Work in Progress
by Kat Leon
Summary: The sequel to The Ghost and Ms. Burkle. Buffy comes to L.A. to investigate Spike's recent reappearance and the death of a young slayer. But Spike's new life with Fred is the last thing Buffy imagined that she would find!
1. Chapter 1

_Work in Progress: part two in The Ghost and Ms. Burkle series_

Joss and Mutant Enemy own all, I shamelessly borrow

Chapter One: Introduction

"_The day you suss out what you do want, there'll probably be a parade. Seventy-six bloody trombones." _

_Spike, Season 6, Once More With Feeling _

_All roads lead to Rome_, Buffy thought. How many times could you hear that while actually living in the Eternal City before you got plain sick of it?

Unfortunately, about a dozen flights a day going in all different directions led out of it, all of them pricey enough to red flag her junior watcher's expense account. No way to fly under the radar on this one. Shoes were easy enough to slip past the council accountant's nose. Tickets to LAX, not so much. She finally decided on the American Airlines junket that connected in New York's JFK and had the flexible return date. JFK because, hello Bloomies' layover shopping, and flexible return because, well, Andrew had a big mouth.

How had it gone? Willow told Xander, who told Dawn, who told Andrew with the caveat to not squeal like Mr. Gordo that Spike was not only alive, but had also felled another slayer. Poor Andrew. Buffy knew that she and Spike were his Pyramus and Thisbe; or more like it, his Han Solo and Princess Leia, and didn't all his favorite characters deserve a happy ending? "Go to him, Buffy," Andrew had pleaded solemnly. "He's waiting for you like the guardian knight of the grail."

"The grail? When did you go all medieval and creatively anachronistic?" she asked.

"No silly, the knight in the Last Crusade. Be his Indy. Rescue him from the binds of his eternal watch." She rolled her eyes at his typical bent of over dramatization, but one of his words rang too true. Rescue. It made sense. They'd been doing it for each other for years.

So on the pretense of following up with Willow's investigation, Buffy clocked her time in California as official watcher business. Yet sometime after the pre-board shots of courage with Xander at the café, and the post-lunch medicinal aid of red wine, and the mid-flight cocktail break, Buffy's certainty about her real mission began to waver.

He probably hated her. Worse yet, he'd be right.

Then: no, not Spike. He'd already forgiven a multitude of her sins. His burning to death in a rain of fire would be just another lover's spat, one easily corrected with the right kind of kiss.

Besides, he had to know that she couldn't really despise any man she kissed like that. All that deep soul kissing, where you really taste a man in the back of his throat. He never tasted dead to her. He had his own flavor, like a spice or like wine. Pepper burgundy hiding thick on the back of his tongue and kissing her like he wanted to plunge inside of her. And then of course later…how he did just that.

She shivered. Best not to think about it too much. Right. That had been their problem all along, hadn't it? The silly time they wasted with her constant debating and deliberating, when the moments that really mattered were when she gave her mind the night off, put her body on autopilot and let herself feel. No conversation, no awkward small talk, only two mouths and two bodies that knew what they wanted and how to get it.

Now if only the plane would land before she lost her nerve.

If she looked windblown and crazy-eyed post-landing, the LA cabbie paid no mind, or at least thought her a typical patron of her destination. Wolfram Hart; what did Angel think he was doing? Never mind, she'd have to straighten him out later. Nothing could interfere with the slayer's mission.

She put her hand up to Angel's eager smile when he tried to greet her at the entrance. "Hi. Good. Flight sucked." She dropped her luggage at his feet. "Where is he?"

"Spike?" Angel looked confused. "He's in the lab."

"The lab. All right. I'm going to the lab." She ran past him, up the stairs to the second floor, glanced around, and ran back down again. "Where is the lab?"

Set on her course, Buffy thought about the scenario. Petri dishes, white rats, a sterile environment, the ideal place to experiment with her new-found resolve on how to make everything right with Spike, starting with what they did best. She'd leave him with no question as to her intentions.

She ignored the white cloaks as she rushed in, tuned out the pert brunette with a clipboard and an attitude who wanted to know just what Buffy thought she was doing. Her eye planted firmly on her prize, Buffy strode purposely over to Spike and clutched his face between her sweaty palms.

"Hey! What the –?" he sputtered.

"Shut up," she whispered and pressed her lips hungrily onto his. She was so flustered and flush with the public display of her own impulsive affection that it took several seconds for her to realize: he wasn't kissing her back.

Slowly, she pulled her pucker away from his unresponsive lips. "Spike?"

He untangled himself from her embrace, looking uncomfortable and embarrassed. He cleared his throat, smoothed his shirt and flashed an uneasy grin. Clipboard Girl scurried to his side.

"So again: can I help you?" the now peeved woman asked Buffy. "Or maybe more to the point, would you consider not helping yourself to my boyfriend?"

Buffy clapped her hand over her mouth. "Oh, god, I'm really sorry. I don't know what came over me, I –" The realization of Spike's title sunk in. "Boyfriend?" she asked the girl. "_Boyfriend?_" she asked Spike with more scorn in her voice than she wanted to be there.

"Ladies," Spike began patiently, his voice balm-ready to soothe any number of hurts. Holding each girl gently by her elbow, he presented one to the other like the Victorian gentleman Buffy recalled he once was. "Buffy Summers this is Winifred Burkle, the head of the science department. Win, love. This is Buffy."

"Oh!" Fred cried and stuck her hand out. The girl had one of the loopiest grins Buffy had ever seen, one part relieved and two parts terrified. Buffy made sure to shake back firmly. "Buffy, hi. I'm Fred. It's so good to meet you finally. I've heard, well. I guess you know probably everything that I've heard 'cause you were pretty much living it. Not that I heard anything bad," she was quick to add. "Spike wouldn't say anything bad. Not that bad things didn't happen but not on purpose, you know, with you or anything."

"Boyfriend," Buffy said again, still shaking Fred's hand and looking searchingly over at Spike, who was watching Fred with fond amusement.

Fred released her hand and wiped it awkwardly on her skirt. "Yeah, sorry about pouncing on you like that."

"She's a little uh, possessive," Spike drawled, biting his lip and roving his eyes from her head to toe. He pulled Fred under his arm and gave her, God, Buffy thought dismally. He gave her the pout!

"Excuse me!" Fred nudged him playfully. "I think protective is more the word for it. Like you're one to talk, nearly knocking poor Knox out for brushing off my lab coat." She teased him so prettily, Buffy thought. No thoughts of demons or evil undead or soul sloshing flitted through Fred's big science brain. Not enough to keep her from Spike anyway.

Spike growled good-naturedly and pinched her lab-coat covered bottom. "He was grabbing your ass. I know an ass-grab when I see it. He's got good taste in them; I'll give him that."

They laughed together and Buffy felt her on-flight meal on its way up. "Oh, yeah," she muttered. "Definitely picked the wrong day to experiment."

Fred glanced back to Buffy, her eyes full of apologies. "So you're here to visit. And that's…great. Sure it's great. I think you guys should visit and get all caught up and holler at me when you're ready to eat. What do you think?"

"Win, are you sure?" Spike asked, watching her carefully, his hands reluctantly releasing her.

Fred agreed a little too eagerly. "Sure, I'm definitely sure and most of all, I'm great. Buffy's here and that's great. Right?"

"Sure," Buffy chimed in. "Great."

"Fine," Spike answered. "I'll take Buffy over to the conference room. Come find me at suppertime?"

Fred nodded and he kissed her temple, rumbled something low and husky into her ear that made her giggle. In the meantime, Buffy found herself enthralled with the pattern of the floor tile. It wasn't from the kiss. Spike's megawatt smile for Fred made Buffy's heart hurt to look at him.

He shoved his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and shook his head ruefully as he escorted her down the hall. "I'll say this for you, Slayer. You can still make a hell of an entrance." He held open the door for her and ushered her inside the conference room. "By all means, psychotic ladies first."

"She hates me."

"Balls," Spike scoffed. "Not my girl. What's a kiss between friends who don't know any better?"

The dark creature of the night wardrobe notwithstanding, black jeans/t-shirt/boots, he looked relatively unchanged. Better somehow. Well-rested was the word for it, Buffy thought.

"Fred – your girl," Buffy opened, beginning the small talk portion of their meeting. "She seems nice."

"Yes, she's nice and great and sure and bollocks." Spike leaned against the wall facing her and folded his arms. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"Angel didn't tell you I was coming?"

"No," he said evenly, tapping his fingers against his arm. "There's a vampire who's going to be sore about the neck and shoulders tomorrow."

"Don't. I told him not to say anything. I didn't think he'd actually do it."

"He's gotten quite docile in his dotage. You'd be surprised."

"Oh, I am. I _so_ am." She slumped into one of the leather conference chairs.

"Are you?" He stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankles, making himself comfortable. Buffy tried to will him not to tilt his head at her. Damn. Too late. He cocked his head at her quizzically. "With what exactly?"

"You. Big with the life changing, and Wolfram Hart working, the alive and a boyfriend being and," she gestured at him weakly. "Everything."

He shrugged. "Globe keeps spinning. You gotta roll with it if you want to stay on."

This was too much. She leaned her elbows on the table and raked her fingers through her tangled hair. "Who are you and what have you done with Spike?"

"Easy now," he set the warning edge to his voice off like a flare. He straightened his back and puffed his chest out with pride. "It's the new and improved me. The Sunny-Hell Light version."

She peered out at him from under the veil of her hair. "How did it happen?"

"What do you mean? I burned in the Hellmouth, popped out into Angel's office, fell in love with Winifred while she made me corporeal and killed another slayer before the slayer killed us all," he said nonchalantly. "Day's work."

"Oh, is that all?" she said with soft sarcasm.

"I gave you the condensed edition there, pet. But if you don't think I'm me, who exactly were you looking for?"

"Clearly someone not here," she said and pushed her chair back with a flourish. She'd heard enough. At this point, she was ready to interview Angel, fill out the requisite paperwork for the council files, and high tail it back to Rome on a steady jet stream of Chianti. Spike watched her calmly and made no moves to stop her. This was the Hellmouth goodbye scene, take two, and she knew she'd never get another chance to play it again.

"I guess…" she faltered. "Oh, boy here goes. I guess I'm looking for the Spike who told me he loved me."

He stared at her stoically. "I did."

She frowned. "Did tell me or did love me?"

"Uh, the former," he said. "Neither. I mean, both. Oh, Christ," he sighed. "Isn't that always the wrench in our works? Never knowing what the hell the other's saying even when we're bloody saying it?"

"Then know this: I told you that I love you," Buffy said. "Past tense 'told.' You got that much, right?"

"Look, you wanted to give me a cheery send-off to the great beyond," Spike said, pacing the room. "I didn't want you to live with another death breathing down your back, so that's why I said...wait." He looked over to her. "Present tense? 'Love?'" The harsh furrow of his brow jumped up in surprise and the old look of longing for her returned to his face. Buffy found this expression of his so beloved and familiar, she felt as though she'd come home.

"What, like I could turn that off? You're dead so I stop loving you, poof?" She shook her head. "You should know, Spike. It's never been that easy for me." She stepped towards him.

As quickly as it had appeared, his gaze of devotion cooled. Buffy could tell what stopped him. Fred might as well have walked into the room so palpable was her presence.

"But now," he began.

"There's Fred. I know. You've come to mean a lot to each other, I get that."

He snorted. "You couldn't possibly."

"Spike," she said impatiently. "I know what we shared. I know how in spending time together, how feelings grow…"

"I'm telling you that it's not the same. You really don't want to tug at this thread, pet," he smirked.

"What?" Buffy finally cried in frustration. "What could possibly be so different with this girl Fred in a few short months that could change the years we spent together?"

His jaw quivered. "For starters, I never had to claw my way into her heart, or get a boot shoved in my face in the answer to a plea for help, or get beaten down time after time for being nothing more or less than what I'd been pigeonholed to be. Never had to prove to her that I'm more than monster and nearly get killed trying. In short, what's different? Everything is different. She's different." He strode across the room to her in all of his cocksure glory. "In other words, Slayer, she's not you."

Just like him, she thought, to make every word hit home. Buffy bowed her head and tried reaching for his hand. "Spike." She held nothing but air.

He waved his hand in front of the glass window. "Magic glass, you know," he said. "Seems everything here's too good to be true." He mused to himself in tones Buffy could barely hear. "Win was the only bird who saw through all my lines, she did. Gave back as good as she got too, but never closed her heart. She's my love. My girlfriend," he chuckled at the word. "Fancy that. Me, with a real girl, who's not superstrength, or well, dead? All she's given me I'll put my life on the line to protect. Because what she's given me, is a real life."

He spoke with all of the tenderness she'd heard for Drusilla, that night they stood shackled in his crypt. All of the heat that he breathed into her that morning in her kitchen, leaning into her to retrieve his lighter. With all of the promise and love he'd vowed in protecting Dawn. All of those things, all in one girl.

"Wow."

He turned around then, as if remembering that she was still there. "I'm sorry for shagging it rough to you like I did, love. But I can't have you wondering if there's a back entrance here somewhere, because there isn't. I shut the door on us when I fell in love with Winifred."

"William and Winifred," Buffy announced. "It sounds…cute in a sort of syrupy, disgustingly cloying kind of way."

"Mm," he grunted, refusing her bait. A small smile played on his lips. "You all right?"

"Kosher as I can be, under the circumstances. You know what they say, pride goeth before the fall," she smiled gamely.

He walked over and rubbed her shoulder, the first Spike touch for her that was nothing more or less than exactly what it was supposed to be, an expression of friendly care. "And how's the pride feeling?" he asked.

She leaned into his arm and pouted. "Major owie."


	2. Chapter 2

"You missed quite a show," he stated with a kind of calm assurance that she'd forgotten about Spike. In a low, matter-of-fact voice, he described what it felt like to burn up in the Hellmouth, to give everything up and be ready to die, only to return in a less-than-hospitable form. "Those first days, I couldn't help but think of you. You coming back from the grave and desperate to feel – anything, other than scared and alone and –"

"Torn," Buffy finished quietly. "It must have been hell for you."

He choked out a laugh. "Yeah, that too," and proceeded to tell her about the Reaper and all that Fred tried to do for him. "It's how we started." His voice hushed shyly. "Only a matter of time before I prodded her into taking me home, spirit me anywhere if it meant out of that bloody laboratory. Now that's where I spend most of my days with her. Funny, isn't it? "

"It's a side-splitter," Buffy agreed grimly. She looked to her shoulder where his hand hadn't moved. She glanced up at him and he met her gaze for one agonizing second. His forefinger reached out and brushed a curl from her neck and she sat very still.

"Buffy," he whispered, and she heard his apology before he had the chance to form the words.

"So where does the psycho slayer fit in, huh? She break into the lab and get fingerprints on all the test tubes or what?" she asked shakily. His hand still rested on her shoulder.

"Not exactly. I –"

"Oh!" Fred exclaimed at the doorway. "You're still here talkin'. I can leave."

"No!" he bellowed, jerking his hand away from Buffy's back and nearly lunging at the door. "No. I was just about to fetch you. We're done here."

_We are?_ Buffy mumbled to herself.

"Don't need to ask whether you're hungry or not," she heard Spike tease Fred. "Your last meal being what, a whole hour ago?"

"Ha-ha."

"You mistake me. I like a bird with a hearty appetite; keeps up your stamina. Missed you sweet," he purred and out of the corner of her eye, Buffy saw him lean into her neck.

"Missed you, too," Fred whispered back shyly.

"Did you now? Give us a kiss?"

Fred glanced over at Buffy and cleared her throat. "If we're going to leave, I should grab my purse," she said pointedly.

"Right, I'll help you with that then." He turned to Buffy. "It's a very big purse." He grabbed Fred's hand and took off with her down the hall.

"And the hits just keep on coming," Buffy muttered. Angel appeared in the doorway.

"Where are they going?"

"To get her purse. Apparently it's a two-person job."

"Yeah," Angel sighed. "A lot of those come up with Spike and Fred."

"I mean, enough with the PDA! Get a room already!" Buffy tried to laugh.

"This is from the girl whose new greeting is shoving her tongue in someone's mouth," Angel said dryly.

She rolled her eyes. "You heard, huh. That didn't take long. When did he get a chance to gloat?"

"Spike didn't say anything. Fred's whole lab is buzzing over your stunt. I haven't seen them this excited since they discovered the exploding mold."

Buffy gave him a puzzled look.

"Yeah, don't ask."

"Can I at least ask what you think you're doing with this place?"

He gave one of his graphic sighs. "I thought I knew."

"You do know that you're running the corporate law equivalent of the Death Star here?" Buffy caught herself. "Sorry, I'm in watcher training with a sci-fi geek who puts the word fan in fanatic. Must be rubbing off."

"So that's what you're worried about, a little of the evil empire rubbing off?"

"On me? Not so much. On you, though…" She shook her head. "Angel, you despised everything about this place. Everything it stood for."

"And I thought we could use it to our advantage, do some kind of good with it. Lately," he shrugged tiredly. "I don't know anymore."

"Hey there!" Spike poked his head in the doorway looking distracted and rumpled.Buffy could see that his shirt was halfway untucked. "Hi. Listen, Fred's got a lot of uh, inventory to do and uh, she really needs me. You two can manage without us?"

"We'll find a way to cope," Buffy replied wryly. "But I do have to talk to you before I fly back."

"You do? You mean, more than you did already?"

"Hello?" Buffy prompted. "You killed another Slayer, Spike. Maybe in self-defense, but I still have to file a report for the council."

"Right," Angel leapt in. "So Spike should definitely talk to you about that. About killing the Slayer."

Spike eyed both of them warily. "Well, I will then. Soon. Tomorrow even." He squinted at Buffy. "When did you say you'd be leaving?"

_Ouch. _Buffy raised her eyebrows in surprise. "I didn't. A lot of it will depend on how many blanks you can fill in for me. So return date cloudy. Ask again later."

"You should take her to that new sushi hut downtown," Spike advised Angel. "She always did like the raw and squiggly bits."

"I'll keep that in mind," Angel drawled.

"Night," Spike waved and headed back down the hall.

"So," Buffy turned to Angel with false brightness. "Who's up for raw and squiggly?"

Angel barely spoke to her on the way to the restaurant, not even acknowledging her compliment on his fleet of sports cars - backhanded as it was. "So this is what the price of a soul is going for these days," she commented as he opened the Viper's door for her. "Good to know." She could tell from the grim set of his chin and his ever-darting eyes that he was working himself up to something.

Thus it wasn't a complete surprise when he guided her to one of the dimly lit back booths and barely let her sit down before blurting out, "Your dough certainly got cooked in a big hurry!"

Buffy blinked. "Excuse me?"

"Italy's climate works as some kind of convection oven? I haven't seen you go after something like this since...well, since you wanted to kill him!"

"I got carried away. Who knew Spike would make an encore from the dead? It threw me, that's all," she tried to dismiss.

"LA's not exactly around the corner from Rome. This trip took some planning." Angel paused and searched her face. "You really wanted this, didn't you? Spike?"

"That's what I get for being decision girl. The whole ignorance is bliss thing? So everything its cracked up to be." She shrugged. "I missed him."

"He missed you too. Until..."

Buffy winced. "I know, until he fell fangs over heels for little Miss Southern Comfort. Are you sure she's not evil? Any girl that skinny has got to have some demon blood flowing in there somewhere."

"Sorry, but Fred's 100 all American, demon-free. I've known her for years."

"And the answer to the 50 million dollar question on why no one called me?"

Angel took a sip of water. "Spike said not to."

"Oh, of course. You two being such tight buds and all, I can see why his opinion so swayed you."

"He figured that Willow would tell you."

She shook her head. "Lame. Try again."

"Obviously, he figured right because you still got here. Buffy, we work together. He's really, come through for me in a lot of ways. Especially this latest problem."

"The recently departed slayer?"

"Well that, and everything that's happened since then. I'm sort of short-staffed. Wesley and Gunn...left the company for a while. When Fred found out, she cut short her medical leave and got Spike to pitch in. I guess I'm pretty grateful."

"Medical leave. She's sick?"

"Um, not exactly."

"She's pregnant?" Buffy joked.

Angel looked pained. "Of course not."

"Right. Vampires aren't exactly the breeding kind."

The little color left drained from his face and he scrambled to pick up the menu. "Maybe we should order."

She snatched the menu out of his hands. "Angel? Maybe you should tell me whatever it is that's got you so freaked. I'm not thinking it's the catch of the day."

"Buffy, trust me when I say it's a really long story."

"Great. I'll order an appetizer first. Now spill."


	3. Chapter 3

"I can't wear lipstick anymore," Fred smiled, dabbing first her mouth and then Spike's with the heel of her thumb. "It doesn't stay on long enough."

"You don't need it. Damn gorgeous as you are." His eyes barely made their way across her face when he stopped, tipped her chin up as though examining her expression in the light. "What's the matter, pet? Come on, out with it. Twenty questions front and center."

She shook her head. "It's none of my business."

"If some bloke waltzed in and threw down with you, I'd bloody well make it my business. What do you want to know?"

Fred hesitated then let the words rush out that had been beating inside her head all day. "She came back for you, just like I knew she would."

"Ah, I'm a whim of hers, that's all," he sniffed, with a wave of his hand that looked much too cavalier to Fred. "Slayer's feeling homesick among the ruins and heard a rumor that an old flame sparked up. She's done the same thing with Angel you know, countless times."

Fred's eyes tipped up to his. "She still loves you."

"Then I reckon she's having a bit of a brood over it, because I'll tell you what I told her. The life I want's with you, Win." He stared back at her with a direct simplicity that warmed her heart with the truth of it.

"Really?"

He glanced at the wall clock of her office for effect. "Got 14 hours. That enough time to convince you?"

"It's a start," she smiled and leaned over to kiss him again.

He walked her downstairs to the garage, opened the driver's side door and nodded to it.

"Get in."

"You want _me_ to drive?" She took a step. "Really. You _want _me to drive? You love this car."

"I love you. Driving practice aside, I want to watch you. Can't do that and mind the road at the same time."

Spike adjusted her behind the wheel of the Viper, explaining all the while the intricacies of its powerful engine while it thrummed through the leather seat beneath her. His palm wrapped snuggly around her upper thigh when he wasn't helping her shift. She mused on how very far she'd come from being a passenger in the past few months. Only Spike could catalyze sex into something as mundane as driving. But then, that's the world she lived in now.

Not too many years had passed for Fred to forget her parents' treatise on the birds and the bees. How she'd blushed at all the adults in her life! To think they all did _that thing_ seemed so impossible. She found the same childish embarrassment returning for a different reason. She knew she wore Spike's mark on her like war paint; the telltale bloom of desire and craving that obliterated all reason. One bleary-eyed morning, she spied her scandalized stuffed rabbit perched on her bookcase, a ringside seat for her nights of marathon lovemaking. "Feigenbaum," she whispered in awe, watching an exhausted Spike sprawl naked and snoring on her bed. "I don't think we're in Texas anymore."

He took her to a place that, in his words, her previous suitors had sorely overlooked. Someplace dark and hot and close, where the taste of salt on a man's skin becomes fuel for a fire that always burns and one touch from him means exploding immediately into something that used to take a while. Dressing for the day meant outfits designed for easy entry and exit, the workplace a jungle of nooks and crannies for stealing a few needful gropes. Cars -- a limitless playground given a little imagination and agility.

She'd heard the girls in the commissary discussing their love lives, where the ruling school of feminine thought contended that the great sex guys wouldn't last. Best to find a stalwart Everyman like Gunn, or a hopeless Merchant Ivory-brand romantic like Wesley. Pure sex boys didn't fall in love; their staying power resigned solely in the bedroom. So how to explain a formerly evil, still lascivious vampire who'd maintained a long-term relationship for over a century?

For all his tough-from-the-street bravado, Charles was at heart an innocent, his sexual experimentation limited to basement fumblings with the neighborhood girls during B-grade soft porn flicks on pirated cable TV. Fred and Gunn became Adam and Eve in the garden, both delighted to find that the person they wanted to see and talk to most during the day transformed into the same person they whispered to under the covers. Every night became another exploration, another uncharted territory and turned into another morning's sticky smooch over diner-style pancakes.

She had no frame of reference, but she imagined that even with Wes' patented dark mystique, he'd be nothing but another foppish dreamer, an over-grown prom date with a wilted corsage proffered from his back pocket, imagining the gymnasium floor into Prince Charming's ballroom.

Her curiosity and love of science shaped and formed her, and that could often explain why she thought the way she did and saw the world in her particular way. But Spike. Pure sex forged Spike and real love moved between them, a gravitational pull on an already solid constellation. When she found that she could influence him in the same way, she felt a power and delight akin to touching the stars.

* * *

Buffy couldn't have been more stunned if, well, if someone had told her that Darla had borne Angel's son. Which had actually just happened. 

"You're a dad. This is huge. You're actually somebody's father."

"Not really. Connor's got his own family. Fabricated, but still family."

"And in order for this new life to take, you erased his memory in all of your friends' minds in exchange for the CEO gig, until the memories came back for some reason, which is why Chuck and Wes made with the disappearing act."

"In a nutshell."

She shook her head. "So why are you still making like Donald Trump? Tell yourself you're fired and get out of there."

"It's not as easy as it sounds. Cordelia, her condition, the coma. Moving her at this stage could ruin any chance of her recovery."

"Got an ETA on when that's gonna happen?"

Angel sighed. "Wish I did. She's the closest thing we've got to a link to the powers that be and I know that I can't make a move until I get some kind of sign from her."

"She just happens to be conveniently unconscious and not making with the helpful visions at the mo'."

He looked stricken. "I'd give anything to have her back."

Buffy tapped her chopsticks on the side of her plate as his expression hit home. "Am I nuts for thinking that sounds like you want her back for more than her visions?"

"Buffy," Angel reached for her hand and for the second time that day, she heard the familiar drones of sympathy in an ex-boyfriend's voice. "Cordy and I...there was this thing. Sort of. It's...we never resolved it or anything but if I get another chance..."

She closed her eyes. "Oh, God."

"Buffy…"

"What is this, two-for-one special day at the Mover's On Club?"

"You were all unbaked the last I knew! What do you want me to say, Buffy? You're here so let's roll back the clock?"

"I'll bet you'd be pretty good at that," she smirked.

Angel narrowed his eyes. "What are you talking about?"

"Wiping your friends memories, resetting your son's whole life, why not throw time travel into the mix? When are you going to get that screwing with all these dimensional folds is a shortcut to Angst-Ville, Angel, no matter how good your intentions?"

"It's dawned on me once or twice, thanks."

The once-coveted sashimi and California roll that she knew must be delicious hit her gullet like lead pellets. What more could you say to a man who'd sired a biologically impossible child, left its mother in dust, and let strangers raise it in the 'burbs in exchange for running an evil law firm? She pleaded jet lag and checked into a hotel, as conveniently far fromWolfram & Hartas her Hilton Honor Points wouldcarry her.

Buffy dialed Willow before bed and gave her the Cliff's Notes on her day.

"All in all," she concluded. "Clearly not a day to bookmark in the slayer diaries. Is Dawn okay? She hasn't gotten married orgiven birth to any mystical childrensince I left, has she? Please Will, I know it's way early for you over there, but I need a big smack with the normal stick."

"Dawn's fine. It went that bad, huh?"

"Put it this way, I made like a Maserati in reverse: 110 to zero in 2.3 seconds."

"Oh, Buffy. I'm so sorry."

"And speaking of Maseratis, Angel's got one! He's got a shiny car to drive for every day of the week he's pining for Cordelia to snap out of it. Will, you should have told me – about Connor, about everything. Especially about Spike's new limb that he actually called his girlfriend," she added pointedly.

"I was working up to it!I just didn't know how to start. Besides, when did this trip become prime time to mack on your exes?"

"I got all sentimentally somewhere over Nevada and I ran with it," Buffy groaned with the memory. "Definitely the last impulse I'll be acting on for a while."

Buffy could hear Willow struggling for a response on the other end. "Fred's nice though isn't she?" she finally managed, witha nervous chuckle.

"Good night, Will," Buffy sighed. "Talk to you later."


	4. Chapter 4

"Late!" Fred shrieked from the bathroom the next morning. "Oh we are so late! And you're not even dressed!"

Spike sat on the edge of the bed, rumpled and naked and wrapped in a sheet. He curled his finger towards her.

"Morning glory. Let's have a look at you."

"We so do not have time for this," she scolded, one hand on her hip.

"Oh, she doesn't have time for me!" he exclaimed in false shock. "The honeymoon is over." He pouted. "Suppose I say please. Like you said please, last night. That do it? Please, oh please…"

She walked over slowly, watching him with amusement.

He spun his finger. "Turn 'round."

She pursed her lips and rolled her eyes, but did as he asked.

"Fresh and pressed you are. Saucy little work clothes, hair all blown out, and shiny pink lips in such a pretty scowl," he clucked his tongue at her and reached up to undo the top button of her blouse. "Want nothing more than to rumple you."

Her top teeth caught on her bottom lip and she inhaled sharply. "You're not going to get dressed at all, are you?"

He grinned devilishly and continued his exploration of her. "Is it my imagination or do those skirts of yours go farther up your thighs every day? You don't wear stockings, thank God. Mmm, look at all those miles of bare leg to climb up. Sweet little knobby knees." He cupped his hand on the smooth underside of her thigh and gripped the muscle there as if testing its strength.

"My knees aren't knobby."

"When you try to balance in those heels of yours you look nothing more than a newborn foal taking her first steps and when you fall," he pulled her to the bed and she gasped.

"You always catch me."

"Always. Straddle me," he said and helped her put action to words. "That's it, love. Let's see what I have here."

He pressed his lips against the pulse at her throat and collarbone, causing her breath to falter. Dizzy with his strength, the thought flashed through her mind how much natural impulse he'd acted on in his life when her blood would mean survival. Even given that power, that inclination, she knew he would never, ever pierce her skin for it. He grazed his nose around the gauzy cotton of her blouse and teased her nipple hard through her bra. His one hand rubbed her right buttock and the other held firm against the small of her back.

Languid heat spread through her like the after taste of liquor. "Mmm," she sighed and dropped back into the security of his hands.

"Ah, there she goes," he noted with pleasure. He carefully folded back the hem of her skirt and she felt his cool hand reach around to massage the moist mound of her panties.

"Thought I'd convinced you to stop wearing these."

She giggled. "I've got to give you some kind of a challenge."

"No, you don't," he said sternly and her eyes flew open.

Hands so strong but his heart stayed vulnerable still. These moments of uncertainty made her want him even more, to be everything for him that he missed. She kissed his forehead and cheeks until his troubled expression passed and his stroking of her resumed.

"Challenges are for wanting what you can't have," he continued quietly, moving back into her heat. "Is that what you are?" He slipped his fingers under the elastic of the thin wet cotton. "Something I can't have?"

"No," she groaned, moving into his fingers and closing her eyes to concentrate on his touch.

"I can have you? For always?" His voice cracked soft and searching, probing, like how his hands probed with sweet insistence under her skirt.

"Yes," she breathed.

"God, Win, so good…"

Mouths open, eyes closed, still they found each other and Fred couldn't kiss him enough. Kisses so far gone from cute or sweet or dear, but deep and hungry and necessary as air. He guided her onto him and both hands went to her lower back, supporting her while he eased her backward until she felt suspended in midair, her calves squeezing against his hips, heels pinching his flanks.

"Every time I see you peeking out of your skirt, balancing on these coltish legs of yours, I think about having them wrapped around me and watching you like this. Trust me, baby?" She nodded and he eased her back farther, slipping in at yet another angle, while his hands eased her pelvis rhythmically down against his. One arm bracing her back, the other lifted her shirt, flipped her bra open, and massaged her breasts. The hand continued to stroke down her ribs and abdomen until it settled right above where their bodies joined.

He rubbed her rhythmically and continued to rock her onto him. "I've got you. That's my girl, my beautiful girl."

He filled her completely and all of her depended on him inside of her. He had everything in control, he knew her body better than she did, and there was nothing left for her to do but give in to him, embrace what he gave to her, squeeze and finally release with a shivering, shaking, body rocking moan.

In one agile twist, he picked her up and pressed her down to the bed and gave himself into her, once, twice, and trembled with the force of it. He lay with his head cradled against her chest.

"We'll call in today," he muttered with gruff authority, a perfect compliment to the soft circles he licked in outline at her heart and throat.

"Again?" she asked lazily and wrapped her arms and legs around the angles of his hips.

"Not yet," he said, not speaking about work at all but about him twitching with life against her belly. He pulled her even closer so that their two sets of lanky limbs fell into place against each other. "But soon enough."

* * *

"They did what?" 

"Called in. They won't be coming to work today."

Buffy stood with her arms folded, trying not to fume. "They aren't sick."

"Never said they were."

"And you're what, letting them get away with this?" When Angel didn't speak, Buffy grabbed her purse off his desk. "Well, I'm not. I've got reports to do. If they won't come here, I'll have to go to them."

"Buffy. Don't."

The beginnings of a shocked smile played on her lips. "Are you telling me what to do?"

"No," Angel said patiently. "I'm asking. Firmly – hopefully persuasively—asking. Leave them alone. They've been through a lot, okay?"

"You don't want them to leave," she said, realization dawning at last. "Permanently. That's why you let them do whatever they want."

"That's part of it. I don't know -- two people who aren't excited to come in to work at the evil law firm every day? Not really seeing the bad, if you know what I mean."

Buffy slumped into a chair, defeated. "Now what?"

Angel glanced around the office. "There are plenty of things to do around here."

"You're right," Buffy smiled. "I can start by taking your statement first."

"I meant in LA. You know, shopping?" Angel nervously began to shuffle papers on his desk. "This isn't really a good time for me."

"Your evil calendar full of evil meetings?"

He shot her an evil look. "Hey, fighting evil here, remember? I still have a schedule to keep. "

"So what's the CEO's planner say for today," Buffy said, sitting on the corner of his desk with a hop and snatching his leather-bound day book before he could grab it away.

Her brow wrinkled in confusion. "All it says for today is 'C." She looked up at him. "See C? C who?"

He pulled the planner out of her hands. "Cordelia. I'm spending the day with Cordelia."

"Okay, did I miss something here? Last I knew, you said she was still in a coma."

"She is."

"Spending the day with a coma patient doesn't rate high on the fun-o-meter. She won't even know you're there."

"No," Angel said quietly. "But I will."

Buffy looked down, feeling not only foolish but hugely sympathetic. "Oh, Angel. God, I'm sorry. It's the jet lag talking, not me."

"Don't worry about it."

"Hey," her face brightened. "I've got a great idea. Why don't I come with and we can talk while you're visiting Cordy? Look at me, all big with the multi-tasking."

"Buffy…"

"Come on, you know you want the company." She knew he didn't really. She did. Maybe he noticed that because he finally nodded his head in reluctant agreement.

"Medical ward here we come."

* * *

"Her hair looks nice," Buffy offered. 

"The nurses. They knew, had heard, about Cordy. It gave them something to do for her. Not that we've been able to do much else." He picked up one of her limp hands that had been recently manicured and moisturized, squeezing it gently. He looked at her face intently and held her hand up to his cheek.

"Come on, Cord. Come on, baby. Listen to me."

Buffy sat in his silence for a few awkward moments, wondering what they could possibly be listening to other than the hiss of the AC fan. Finally, she cleared her throat.

"Uh, quick tip here. If you want her to listen to you, it helps to say something."

"Ssh!" Angel hushed her. "I'm trying to speak to her with my mind."

"Oh, of course you are," Buffy leaned back in her chair wondering when exactly Angel had gone insane. "Go you."

"She's a seer, Buffy. Well, was," he sighed. "Maybe she's operating on a plane that we can't access." He closed his eyes and meditated next to her for another few quiet seconds.

Buffy came up on the other side of the bed and took Cordy's other hand. Angel's eyes opened and rested on her. "Maybe I can help." He smiled gratefully.

She tried hard to sit still, but the hospital smell bothered her and reminded her of other even less pleasant times, the A/C made the room cold and dry, and the fact that Angel chose such a strange way of communicating with Cordy bothered her not a little.

"I'm sorry," Buffy whispered. "Is there something I should be saying? I mean, in my head? Shouldn't we be saying the same thing so she doesn't get confused?"

"Okay," Angel said. "How about we greet her, like 'Hello Cordelia,' then say, 'let us know you hear us.' Sound good?"

"Hey, it would bring me out of a coma any day."

Angel flashed her a reproving look and the two closed their eyes again.

After a few more painful moments of silence, Buffy couldn't help but let out a sigh of exasperation.

"Now what?" he asked.

"Sorry. I was just wondering: what will you do if she wakes up?" At the widening of his eyes, Buffy quickly changed her question. "When, I mean. _When_ she wakes up?"

"Welcome her home," he answered quietly. "I can't tell you anything more than that. What she feels, what she thinks, what she's remembered. I have no way of knowing. I just want her back." He leaned into Buffy's face. "Look. I'm not asking you to understand, I'm not telling you it's anything like we were..."

"Don't," Buffy said, holding up her hand. "Just...don't." She took a small breath. "It's not like I gave you the inside scoop on Spike."

"He was... in your heart, if I recall," he replied stiffly.

"Yeah," she admitted. "He still is."

"Oh." Angel sounded surprised. "How are you doing with that?"

Buffy shrugged. "I'll deal. So Cordy?"

He hesitated. "She's in my heart."

"Right. Got it." She could barely form the next words. "You love her." After watching Spike with Fred, she thought that Angel's revelation would hurt less or not matter as much somehow. But he nodded and her world crashed down again.

"She's changed," Angel said as if by way of explanation.

"Yeah, into what?" Buffy couldn't help asking. "Last you told me, she became the queen bee of one damn evil hive."

"It wasn't her fault!" Angel snapped. "She had no idea what she was getting into."

"Just like we have no idea what's already gotten into her once she comes back. Think about it, Angel."

Angel looked at Cordelia's peaceful face, threaded his fingers between her own. " I can't just leave her there, wherever she is."

Buffy tried to look at him with as much sympathy as she felt. "Maybe she's in a better place."

"You mean like you were?"

Buffy sat back, startled. "Hold it. What exactly do you think I'm saying?"

Angel turned to her, hands on his hips and shaking his head with disgust. "You think she's died the hero's death, just like you did and I'm making some big pull-her-back-from-the-great-beyond-gesture just like your friends did with you. One problem with that: Cordelia's not dead! You never fail to see yourself in every situation, do you Buffy?"

"Angel, I'm not going out of my way to identify with Cordelia here, believe me. I want you to, you know, look at all the possibilities. Her coming back might not be a good thing."

"For you, you mean."

"For you, you thickheaded moron," Buffy shot back, rolling her eyes. "You might get back a little less than you want and a little more than you can handle."

"I appreciate your concern," he said curtly. "You can leave at any time."

"And leave you to do what? Make a go of your deep thoughts with Snow White here?"

Angel stood up and pushed his chair back with a screech of wood against tile. "You can stop now."

She stood up and curled her hands into fists. "Not even warmed up."

"Buffy, this isn't the time or the place."

"Then name it, because I'm a little too stunned by your new trips to denial land to care about being polite."

"This isn't about Cordy at all is it? It's about Wolfram and Hart. After everything I've told you, you still don't trust me."

"No Angel. You don't trust yourself and that's what scares me more than anything. This place, what it's doing to you, to your judgment – to your whole team! This evil you're supposedly fighting has tainted every person close to you here. Doesn't that scream a big Danger Will Robinson?"

"Of course it does!" Angel yelled. "So I'm supposed to pull out now, completely blind, not knowing what's caused any of this or who's behind it? Not to mention what they'll do to any of us if we try to run."

Buffy threw up her hands. "So you keep going in further? That's your answer?"

"Noooooo!" Cordy screamed and sat straight up in bed. Angel and Buffy jumped away from her body in surprise as the once-comatose girl continued to scream.

"No, no, God, no, it can't be! It can't be happening!" she panted and Angel rushed back to her side, grabbed her flailing hands, trying in vain to soothe her.

"Cordelia! It's me! It's Angel!"

She pulled her hands away, stroked his face and his hair with trembling, desperate touches. "Angel, Angel, is it really you?"

"Yes, it's me, me and Buffy and…"

Cordy turned horrified eyes in Buffy's direction and began to scream anew. Buffy retreated into a corner of the room, too stunned from Cordelia's reaction to move.

"Cordy stop!" Angel said over the din and at that moment, three nurses and two doctors rushed into the room with a hypodermic needle and restraints.

"No, don't touch her! She just woke up!"

"Sir, this is for Ms. Chase's own good. This is a very mild sedative, simply to calm her." Angel watched miserably while the medical team held poor Cordelia down with the restraints they attached to the bed, then injected her. He stroked her face, which was now sweaty and flushed.

"Angel, my God, you have to get away from it!" she whispered, her eyes growing heavy. "It's going to destroy us all!" Her head slumped over to the side of her pillow and Angel pressed his fingers against her throat.

"Her pulse is racing," he said.

Buffy stepped forward tentatively. "Well, that was intense," she said with a shaking voice. "Remind me never to underestimate the powers of meditation."

He looked up at her. "I don't think that was it. I think she heard us arguing and was responding the only way she knew how."

"With a vision?"

Angel nodded. "I'm not leaving her side until she comes to. Given her reaction to you, I think its probably best if you find somewhere else to go."

His words stung. Buffy opened her mouth to protest and then saw the expression on Angel's face. He wouldn't be budging on this. "Fine, but I need something else to do here besides shoe shopping. I'm on Council business, Angel. I have to clock my time."

Angel frowned and pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, rifling through bills and extracted one business card and a yellow post-it note.

"The information on that piece of paper is what Wes and Gunn gave me for emergency contacts in case something came up. I have no reason to believe it isn't accurate. The business card is from Lorne. He's gone back into the karaoke business. It's a good place for a demon bar; he keeps it under a spell as a sanctuary, meaning no violence. You'll be safe."

"No beat 'em up shoot 'em up? Aw, darn," Buffy said sarcastically, taking the scraps of paper from him and putting them in her purse. "You know, even if I get to talk to all of them today, doesn't mean that I'm finished here."

"I know. But Cordelia has to be my priority right now, Buffy, I'm sorry." His eyes were huge with hope and she could almost see him smile. That alone gave her a final push out the door.

_Demon bar, huh? _She fingered Lorne's business card and wondered if 11 am would be too early for a cocktail.


	5. Chapter 5

Fred brushed her lips against the cool cheek of her snoozing lover, thinking briefly that she should wake him and tell him her plans for the day. She frowned then, remembering her promise to Angel. She'd made so many promises to Angel. Today it felt like too many.

"Honey, I'm going out for a while," she whispered in his ear, earning only a drowsy grunt. Feeling vaguely unsatisfied by his response, she grabbed her keys and headed out into the fierce noonday sun. Of all the days for a possible interrogation, Spike had slept in when she felt most like confessing. This lying by omission had to stop soon. Or she had to do better detective work and fast.

She ventured the car out onto the freeway, hands shaking faintly on the wheel, cursing both the traffic and her fear of it. Once she settled on a speed in one of the slower lanes, she felt her thoughts unwind, as they always seemed to do on these trips.

She'd killed someone. A human being – a crazed murderer, true, but a living person nonetheless. No more hiding behind the boys who could do it better, she'd shown how she could do just fine on her own. Now that her head reminded her of that, it could flit away on to more pressing matters. Today, the recent reappearance of Buffy suddenly vied for attention. Well, she wouldn't think about that. Connor. He had to be the priority.

Last week, she'd taken Angel's directions to the family's home in the suburbs, finding Connor's beat up foreign hatchback in the driveway and the Reillys enjoying a cook out on their deck. From the camouflage of the privet hedge around the house, she listened to how Connor never had enough gas money and brought home twice as much laundry then he'd ever had living under their roof, but heard no evidence of traumas new or old. If he seemed plagued with memories of a past life, he certainly kept them hidden. _But then, we all got pretty good at that_, Fred thought.

This week, Angel asked her to do some recon at Connor's college. Why he couldn't go himself, Fred knew enough not to ask. He'd seen Connor only once after the mindwipe and since then, Angel explained, nothing had gone right. Better he stay away, make the Senior Partners think that he'd taken to his post with gusto. Fred had nodded, but she knew the truth. If Connor's memories had really returned, she didn't think Angel could bear seeing him in that kind of pain again. She didn't know if she could either, but she wasn't his parent. In theory, she could be detached.

She parked in visitor parking and checked herself out in the rear view mirror: hair pulled back in a ponytail, just a hint of lip-gloss. She would fit right in.

As she made her way around campus, a burn of nostalgia wallowed up in the back of her throat. Oh, how she had wanted this, all of it. From the first dorm room where she had to unplug her lamp to play her stereo, to the pre-dawn hours in the library when she'd look up from her books to hear birds and be astounded that an entire night had passed so quickly. She hoped that whatever Connor did with his time here, that he wasn't wasting it.

A quick knock on the door of the room the student directory said belonged to Connor Reilly brought out an altogether different, shirtless boy with a toothbrush stuck in his mouth.

"Yeah?" he mumbled and did a quick appraisal of Fred's smile and figure. "Hey," he said. "Quick sec, hon, lemme spit." He ducked behind the door.

Fred rolled her eyes in disgust. All the things she missed about school didn't include guys like this one. He reappeared with a towel wrapped around his neck and a minty fresh grin.

"You've got a sink in there?" she asked.

His grin faded. "Uh, no."

Fred wrinkled her nose. "I'm looking for Connor. Is he around?"

The boy's eyes widened. "Are you Brenda? 'Cause, you know, I know he didn't mean anything, he wasn't blowin' you off or nuthin…"

"No, I'm not Brenda," she said patiently. "I'm… I'm his physics tutor."

"No shit, I didn't even know he was taking physics," the boy scratched his head, looking relieved. "I bet he's in the library. Second floor stacks? He's been going up there a lot."

"He has?" Fred asked, suddenly worried. "Is he okay? Is anything weird going on with him?"

The boy looked at her suspiciously. "You sure you're not Brenda?"

"Yeah," Fred sighed. "I'm sure."

"Look, I'll tell him his…uh, 'tutor' stopped by," the boy continued with a playful leer that made Fred aggravated. "Con's one lucky shit, man."

Fred turned away and headed down the hall. "Let's hope so."

When she found the library, she also found Connor exactly where his roommate had described, sitting at a large table in the arching amber light of half moon windows. This section of the library, with its carved wooden banister and Deco window casings, looked so familiar and Fred almost cried out when she realized how much it looked like the upper floor of the Hyperion. She wanted to run over and grab hold of him, assure him that she'd keep him safe. Then she looked at him with his mussed hair and his pursed lips, deep in thought in some dusty volume. Connor looked perfectly safe, serene almost. What would he remember of her, if at all: the girl who called him "honey" and made him baloney sandwiches or the one who'd whipped out the taser and electrocuted him for his betrayal? With the sight of him swimming in her tears, she turned around and headed out of the library. No wonder Angel couldn't do this.

"He's fine," Fred said in a shaking voice into her cell phone on the way to the car. "I just wanted to let you know that he's fine. I'll – I'll come back, check on him again, if you want me to. Call me, Angel."

Fred sobbed in the car all the way back to the apartment, all of the pains of loss rearing up and coming out to play. The slayer she killed who never would've been whole, the broken young man that his father would rather save and lose than keep, the friends and co-workers who had abandoned Angel's crusade when they found how deeply he'd implicated them all. Maybe the man she loved, too, would be heading for the same sunset. She knew how Spike loved, had felt the glow of it all these months. He didn't turn that off. He wouldn't, not for her. So how could he for Buffy, after spending years together?

Fred ran upstairs, so sure that he would be gone, and took him by surprise in the kitchen as he bent over the refrigerator and sipped blood out of a mason jar. She pulled him close and kissed him, oblivious of the blood on her mouth and he recovered quickly, setting the jar on the counter so that he could wrap both arms around her.

"Go off like that more often, if that's the welcome home I get," he said.

She pulled back and looked at him. "I'm always happy to see you, I don't take you for granted do I?" She shook his waistband gently. "Well, do I?"

"Win, love. Slow down," he pushed the hair from her sweaty face. "Couldn't ask for anyone more happy to see me than you. You couldn't take me for granted if you tried."

"Okay."

"What happened today? Where'd you go off to?"

She looked down. "I – I did something for Angel. An errand."

"Must've been a hell of a one with the look you have on your face," he took her hand and sat her at the tiny kitchen's café table. "Tell me all about it."

She shook her head. "I'm all right."

"Win," a surprised smile flashed on his face. "Come on then. Let me help."

"You can't," she choked. "I gotta do this. Angel doesn't want anyone else involved."

Spike stiffened next to her. "Right. Angel doesn't want. So Spike doesn't get."

Her stomach took a sick nosedive. "Please don't be that way."

"You know, it isn't like I knew why he had the big forgetting spell done. Near about drove you over the edge with those migraines, if you recall. That's all I cared about."

"I know that."

"Then when you all gonna stop punishing me for it?"

"He's not, I'm not," Fred stammered.

"You bloody well are! Time used to be that you'd never keep a thing from me. We past that already?"

"No, of course not."

Fred couldn't explain, not even to herself, why she'd agreed to go after Connor for Angel and why she had to make such a secret out of it. How if she could save Connor on her own – perhaps to replace the life of that poor slayer – how it would make everything else hurt a little less.

"Win," he said, with sudden tenderness. "I'm sorry. Look, if it's important enough for you to go off on your own, I suppose I ought to respect that."

She looked up at him. "It isn't anything bad."

"'Course it isn't," he said and took her into his arms. "Guess both of us, holed up here together, we gotta get some sense of space when we can."

_Did he say, 'holed up here?' _Fred thought dismally. Mind racing, she rested her head on his shoulder but felt far from comforted. "S-sure."

"I should take your lead -- start patrolling again myself, catch up with Charlie, shake out a few nests. He's got to be up to his balls in vamp attacks on that side of town."

"Um, well, yeah," she mumbled. "If you think so."

He took her face in his hands and kissed her soundly on the forehead. "You floor me, pet. Barely back on the road to Wellsville and still thinking of the good fight."

"Yeah," she said faintly, feeling ashamed. "That's me."

He snuggled her briefly and then jumped to his feet, opening and closing kitchen drawers. "You got that number at the shelter he gave us? Wait 'til I tell him. Me back on the streets," Spike chuckled. "I'll shock the hell out of him."

"And he's not the only one," Fred agreed. But Spike had already left the room.

* * *

"Fret not, kumquat," Lorne said, patting the girl's head that rested on the back of her hand. In the hours since Buffy had woken him with not so gentle pounding on Caritas' front door, she had poured out her sob story while he poured the cocktails. "Everything's gonna work out." 

Buffy leveled a glare at him. "Right. Any minute now, one or both of my exes will come galloping after me and give me all the information I need to magically clear them of any wrongdoing in the death of that slayer."

Lorne thought for a moment. "On second thought, you fret. I'll blend." He headed back behind the bar and reached for the bottles to make another banana daiquiri.

"Okay, but this is the last one. The ability to hold vast amounts of rum does not come standard on this Slayer model." She slid her glass over to Lorne and tried a smile. "Thanks for listening. You're a good host. Probably a good friend, too."

"Yeah, not so much like your buddy with the angelic features would notice." Lorne hit the power switch on the blender and soon filled her glass brimful with frothy banana foam.

"So you're never going to work with Angel again? After all those years?"

"Never's a long time, Chiquita. But you know, I couldn't play through any round of chess where I came out looking like a green horned pawn." He held up his hands when Buffy began to protest. "I know, I know, he did it for the love of his son. Save the chorus of violins. I can think of a boatload of other ways he could've gotten me on board The Good Ship Lollyvamp without the memory loss."

"Yeah," Buffy agreed glumly. "Also by not pulling into the most major port of all evil on the SS Wolfram & Hart." She shook her head. "God. Now you've got me doing it." She slugged back the daiquiri until it disappeared behind her lips.

He shook the chilled pitcher of the blender. "Whaddaya say the last round's on me? It's the least I can do."

"Hit me," Buffy sighed and then caught his eye. "Not really."

"No kidding," he snorted. "Empath demon versus Slayer? Even I'd bet against me in that match."

"Empath huh?" Buffy sipped this drink rather than guzzling it, imagining an evening of regurgitating bananas. "How's that work out?"

"Well, I'd be a mite better if your less-than-sane-Slayer never slipped me that joy juice," Lorne frowned as he poured vodka into his own glass. "My love for the Sea Breeze ain't just about chugging the classics. Any other kind of booze will send me straight down with no chance to count. That slayer must have studied up on me and then switched out all my precious Stoli with some lethal home brew of her own. She wanted me pretty damn dead."

Buffy looked up at him in sympathy. "You're still feeling green, huh? Or, well, greener."

"It's not my color, toots, it's my radar. Reading into the heart of another through the many off key songs they sing, that's my special gift. Well," he sipped thoughtfully. "Was."

"You can read people?"

"People, demons, feisty blonde Slayers. Before I got sick, I would've heard you coming for miles, or picked up on some other demon that did. I would have greeted your little wakeup call this morning with a buffet breakfast built for two. Now all I've got to read with is a fairly shaky sense of Deathwok intuition that won't even help me out at Bingo night." He smiled at her sadly. "Don't mind him; he's just the guy who lost the only way he could help his friends."

"And you blame Angel," Buffy sighed.

"Look, you seem like a nice kid, so don't take this wrong. I can't help him anymore. My gift is gone. I've got nothing more to offer him than," he waved his hands around the bar. "Cocktails and dreams."

"Lorne, even I can tell you've got a lot more to offer than that, to Angel – to all of them. What about Wesley? Or Charles Gunn? Don't you see them anymore, either?"

"Gunn's taken the fight out of the boardroom and back to the streets where it can really do some good. I wouldn't think of getting in his way there. Wes..." Lorne paused, threw back a swallow. "Let's say that for as sick as I got, at least morphine addiction wasn't part of it. He's been in rehab for weeks."

Buffy grimaced, not at the drink in front of her but at Lorne's words. "See, and somehow I've got to show the Council that losing this lunatic slayer was really some kind of crime."

"The only crime I see is that she got allowed to live as long as she did."

"And you really don't know who killed her?" she asked, a hopeless whimper edging into her voice.

Lorne shook his head. "Just to know that she wouldn't be making a return appearance on my stage was enough for me."

She sighed. "This visit to LA is never going to end."

"There just isn't a stake big enough, is there?" Lorne smiled benevolently.

Buffy looked up at him. "Maybe it's just the rum talking but…huh?"

"You're really taking a beating on your fellas moving on with all sorts of ladies not you, arentcha?"

She sulked and hung her head. "Thought you said you lost your powers of empathy," Buffy mumbled into her drink.

"Not all of them, sweets," Lorne sighed and patted her hand. "Not all of 'em."

* * *

"Hot showers, yes, absolutely. Separate rooms for boys and girls. I wouldn't have it any other way," Anne told the voice on the phone. If she seemed more interested in the handsome man painting her walls, the caller had no way of knowing, or could see the dreamy way her eyes traveled up the back of her painter's impressive frame. 

"We keep kids from all sorts of backgrounds, sure we can get them to court if they need to. We've actually got free legal counsel here at East Hills. Yeah," she winked at the man when he turned around on his ladder to look at her. "He's a new addition to our crew." Her smile turned fond and somber. "He doesn't care about making money. He wants to give something back to the kids."

When she hung up the phone, she walked over to the wall covered with fresh paint. "You missed a spot."

Gunn jumped down from the ladder and right in front of her, causing her to giggle. "You gonna show me?"

"Right here," she whispered, and gently wiped off the spatter of yellow paint on his nose with the corner of her sleeve.

Gunn glanced around the room. "You're gonna love this when it's done. This color will brighten up the whole place, give the kids something nice to wake up to."

"Lucky kids," she murmured. "What about me?"

He looked back down at her and smiled, wrapped his hand loosely around her waist. "You don't gotta worry 'bout a thing."

Anne leaned against him and breathed against his shirt. "That's good to know."

"One thing, though," he said, resting his head on hers. "You might wanna watch how you plug your new legal eagle, Annie."

Her arms slipped around him and snugged into his back pockets. "You change your mind?"

"Nah, I don't know my mind, is all. Who knows how long until that speed-read education I got goes flying out of my head? I didn't earn it, got no reason to keep it."

Anne poked her head up. "Then you better use it in as many good ways as you can before it's gone."

Gunn pulled her close and grinned. "Yes, ma'am." He leaned in to kiss her on the lips when the phone rang noisily, effectively interrupting them.

"So goes the life of the public servant," she laughed and skipped over to the desk to answer the phone.

"East Hills Teen Center." She listened for a minute, then handed the receiver out to Gunn with a puzzled expression on her face. "Somebody wants to know if you still patrol."

Gunn wiped his hands on his jeans and fairly leapt for the phone. "Then somebody forgot who he's calling."

* * *

"And this should be the last of it," the deliveryman said to Wesley. "Just need your signature here and here." Wesley signed the proffered clipboard and the man hesitated in the doorway, an uncomfortable silence between them. 

"Oh, of course," Wesley stammered, reaching in his back pocket and pulling out a $20 bill.

The man held his hands up and shook his head. "Nah, it's taken care of, even the tip. Which got me to thinkin', what kind of company replaces everything in your house for free? This has gotta be the biggest one time haul we've done in a while."

"What can I say?" Wes smiled weakly. "They take care of their own."

"I'll say," the man agreed. "You ever need somebody on your maintenance crew, I'm your guy." Wesley took the man's business card and closed the door with a wave.

He leaned back against it. Leave it to Angel to overcompensate. Be taken hostage by an insane slayer who temporarily addicts you morphine and earn a paid dry out at Palm Springs' finest detox center and a newly redecorated apartment. Of course, everything that Leah had touched during her brief break in at Wesley's had been destroyed in his absence -- he knew that. Still, something about his fabulous parting gifts on the dime of Wolfram & Hart made him feel uneasy.

He walked over to the glass topped side table with the cellophane wrap still entwined around its chrome legs and plugged in his new Vtech phone; the minute he did so, it rang. The caller ID read UNKNOWN, but he answered anyway.

"I'm looking for a Mr. Wyndham Pryce," a thin, reedy male voice hissed on the other end.

"You've found him. How may I help you?"

A pause. "This the son of Roger Wyndham Pryce? The boy who's running the artifacts and antiquities research department?"

"Yes, the son – not the boy," he replied testily. "I've left Wolfram & Hart. I can provide you with the name of my replacement if you like."

"Replacement?" the man said with an annoyed snort. "I don't want some replacement. Your former employers have something that belongs to me and I want it back."

"Sir, Wolfram & Hart stores many things, I'm sure quite a few that aren't in the possession of their rightful owners. I'll be happy to walk you through the necessary paperwork to file a claim with them –"

"Nonsense!" the man snapped. "I won't file a claim. I was told to contact you and that you would be able to assist me."

"Well, I'm afraid that's impossible. I don't work for the company any longer and any clearance I once had to their facilities has been removed." Wesley hesitated. "Exactly who gave you my name?"

The man chuckled. "Interested parties, son. I assure you, I would be able to make it worth your while. You being unemployed at the present time."

"Thank you. I have a generous severance."

"But you don't have the girl, do you?"

Wesley's blood ran cold. It must be someone from the security team testing him to see if he would try to break into the vaults for a price, use the knowledge he had attained, become a renegade. Truthfully, he wanted nothing to do with the company or its CEO ever again, no matter what the price. But Fred. To bring up Fred seemed impossibly cruel and unnecessary.

"Pity on her choice of companion," the man continued. "But that's not your fault. Perhaps a different outcome can still be arranged."

Wesley gripped the phone. "See here. I don't know who you are or what exactly you're suggesting, but you stay away from Ms. Burkle. She's an innocent and only remains employed at that place out of the kindness of her heart."

"I do not doubt her kindness. Her innocence, however?" the man laughed lowly. "I suppose it depends on your definition."

"You stay away from her," Wesley seethed.

"Calm down, man. My interest lies with you. I merely wished to demonstrate how much I know, how much I am capable of assisting you in return for the favor of a meeting."

Wesley had seen the vaults, knew only a fraction of what they held, the horrors that many of their contents could inflict given the right set of ingredients or magiks. He wouldn't think of turning over one of the artifacts to a threatening voice on the telephone while he was still employed with Wolfram & Hart, never mind now.

However, the man had brought a variable into the equation and despite Wesley's recent treatment for addiction, he still could not shake his compulsion to all things Fred.

"I am prepared to offer proof," the man added.

Wes sighed. What would be the harm in a meeting? If anything, he could warn Fred against a powerful new enemy that could be identified and eliminated with his help.

"Where and when?"

"Ah, excellent. You are familiar with the sanctuary in downtown Los Angeles, I imagine? Another former coworker of yours is there?"

"Yes, Caritas," Wesley said with relief. No harm could befall him at Lorne's place.

"That's the name. Meet me at Caritas at six tonight. We'll have a nice chat you and I, and you can see if we may strike a mutually beneficial agreement."

"How will I know who you are?" Wes asked quickly, before the man could hang up.

"No need, son, no need," the man replied with a chuckle. "I already know who you are."


	6. Chapter 6

Angel persuaded the doctors to let him take Cordelia to his penthouse, rather than let her languish for another minute in the medical ward.

Well, as much as "persuading" could be called picking her up and taking her out to a chorus of protests.

Now in his bed - Cordy in his bed, though not like he'd ever imagined it - he thought she looked more peaceful. Or perhaps he just wanted to assuage his guilt.

He pulled a chair next to the bedside and watched her critically. What the hell had happened to her that morning? Something about him needing to stay away from "it," how "it" would destroy them all. What "it?" And why had she screamed even more horrifically when she saw Buffy? Frustrated, he pushed himself out of the chair and walked over to the windows, gazing out helplessly as though they'd manifest some answers. What could it possibly all mean?

"And for my next trick…" He heard a weak, but lovingly sardonic voice come from the bed.

He whipped around. "Cordelia?"

"That's me," she said, in a tone that tried to be breezy but failed miserably. "It's really me, Angel, I promise."

Relief washed over him and he crossed the room to her side, hugging her so close he practically pulled her out of the bed.

"Whoa," she mumbled. "Your hugging has so improved while I've been gone."

Angel drew her away from him so he could look at her dear face, her smile, and her eyes brimming with tears. "You just get the extra special ones now."

"Well, lucky me," she said softly, and pulled him close as well.

They stayed like that for a few minutes until Cordy began to squirm.

"Uh, Angel."

"Yeah?"

"Still gotta breathe, big guy," she said from the depths of his chest.

"Oh, right, I'm sorry, here," he lay her back down and stepped backward. "What do you need? Are you hungry? Thirsty? Maybe you want a shower, there's a bathroom right around the corner, great water pressure."

"Angel, sit."

He obeyed.

"Okay, now stay," she added with a giggle. "Please stay. Although I guess you got that command down pat." Her expression turned serious. "I know you sat with me - a lot - during my mother of all dirt naps. That means everything to me."

"They said, that you were in pretty deep," he said, feeling all of sudden shy and nervous around her. "That you wouldn't be able to tell."

"Oh, I could tell," and from the look on her face and the tone of her voice, he didn't doubt it.

"So," he said, trying to be casual. "How do you feel?"

"Honestly? I'm a little woozy and..." She looked around, suddenly aware of her surroundings. "Hello plush bachelor pad! Wow, did we blow up the Hyperion one too many times and score some insurance money or something?"

"Uh, we aren't at the Hyperion."

"Well, even private hospitals aren't this swanky." Cordy looked at him warily. "So forgive the obvious post-coma routine but where am I?"

Angel exhaled heavily, realizing that he couldn't dodge the truth from her.

"Wolfram and Hart."

Cordelia stared at him for a moment, her mouth half open in stunned surprise. Then slowly, the corners of her mouth twitched up and she began hooting with laughter.

"Right! Good one!" she giggled. "Way to mess with the Blackout Chick."

"Cordy."

"You're serious," she realized, her eyes growing wide. "Oh, my God, we're prisoners. They - they're forcing you to do their bidding! Angel!" She snapped her fingers and waved her hands in his face. "You can beat this! You're stronger than this!"

"Stop," he said calmly, taking her hands in his, glad to see that she hadn't lost her penchant for the dramatic. "We're not prisoners. Well," he considered that. "Not technically. I'm here - we're here - willingly."

Cordelia watched him doubtfully. "Yeah, sounds it."

"No, really," he said. "I took this place over and we're fighting it from the inside, doing some real good."

"Keep telling yourself that, champ," she winked. "It just might stick. Me, I've already seen what you've been up to. I just wanted to hear what you'd say about it."

"You-you mean you know?"

"Kind of the bonus prize for getting your body hijacked," Cordy mused. "You get the Cliff's Notes for everything you missed."

"So you know about me taking over Wolfram & Hart?" Then he realized. "You saw it! I knew you had a vision this morning!"

"Whoa, yeah. Can't say I really missed _them_."

Angel frowned. "Whatever you saw made you scream."

Cordy bit her lip. "Let's just say it was vivid."

"And Buffy…she's got something to do with this?"

Cordelia looked at him blankly.

"Cord, you screamed right in her face."

"Oh, that," she dismissed. "Nah, that's just my gut reaction from seeing you with Buffy again."

He smiled in spite of himself. "It is so good to have you back."

"Well, don't get too comfy, we've got a lot of ground to cover." She looked at him fondly. "Boy, the questions you must have brewing under that unplucked brow. It's broodier than usual."

"There's only one that's important," he said, hesitating before he asked. "Do you really remember everything?"

She grew quiet and shifted her head to one side, in obvious thought. Finally, she looked up at him, her eyes very bright and lucid.

"Yeah," she nodded. A small smiled played on her lips. "It really worked then. That's wild."

"What's wild? Cordy," he grabbed her shoulders. "Talk to me."

She stared at him for a moment as thought just seeing him for the first time. "Oh, Angel," she choked and began to sob in sudden, heartbreaking spasms. "I'm so sorry!"

"Cordy, no, it's not your fault."

"It was awful! To be doing those things and yet not doing them, to be watching from inside, helpless, while the Big Bad Whatever took my body for a joy ride and ran all over you guys in the process."

"Shh," he whispered and pulled her close again. "It's okay. It's all going to be okay."

"Well, it is now," she sniffled.

Angel froze. "What do you mean?" He peered down at her, almost afraid at what he might see.

But she looked back up at him in complete calm, tears drying on her face. "I mean I made sure that things are going to be okay now. The Powers That Be owed me one, and I didn't waste it."

His throat tightened. "How?"

She chuckled and wiped her eyes. "With me pretty much buckled down to the passenger seat of my own body, I had a lot of time for pondering. And I realized that my big journey? My whole rise-to-a-higher being thing? So not a divine purpose gig," she shook her head. "I was so selfish."

"How can you say that? The visions? That pain you went through for us? For me?"

"For me," she corrected, looking at him. "I was so desperate to be anybody that didn't look like the PMS head cheerleader. Vision girl, whatever it took. But not for anyone besides myself and definitely not for the mission." She drew a shaking breath. "I would've become practically anything if it got you to keep me around - as long as it didn't mess with my perfect size six and flawless complexion."

Angel shook his head. "Cordy, this is nuts."

"Okay, you caught me, size eight," she grinned faintly. "But everything else is true, Angel." Her expression turned serious again. "The Powers are definitely not down with the half-assed commitment phobes like me. So I got what I deserved."

"No one deserved what you got," Angel muttered. "Especially not you."

"Yeah, I think around the mystically evil yet realistically painful childbirth the Powers agreed with that," she said wryly. "That's when they inked my deal."

His brow furrowed. "Deal?"

"Call it a dream state," she shrugged. "Pretty- pretty voices from on high told me that if I just let go, they'd cut you a break." Cordy reached up and touched his face with a loving hand. "So I did."

"Cordy," he whispered, terrified that she'd evaporate into thin air.

"But what they didn't count on was you. All of you. None of you let me go. So thank you," she said softly. Then her trademark Cordy grin shone brightly. "And in return, presto, voila," she looked around and waved her fingers to demonstrate a magic sleight of hand. "We get this."

"Uh," he looked around with her. "I don't see anything."

"Sure you do, it's all of this. This reality. This if-we're-very-good-kids-and-don't-fuck-it-up-we-can-live-happily-ever-after-or-something-close-to it here."

"I run the LA branch of my worst enemies," Angel said evenly. "Buffy's investigating us nine ways to Sunday on behalf of the new Watcher's Council, Fred's sleeping with Spike, a young Slayer's dead, I'm a stranger to my own son, and three of my formerly best friends have quit and aren't speaking to me," he finished. "This is your version of a happy ending?"

"Hey, not like we had much to work with before this, bucko," Cordy said warningly. "I'd take it if I were you." She squinted at him. "Fred's sleeping with Spike?"

"Yes," he sighed. "They're living together, actually."

"Wow," she marveled. "What frickin' bizarro world did I wake up in, anyway?"

"That's what I'd like to know. Cord," Angel shook his head again. "I don't know what to do with any of this."

"You live it," she said softly. "And hopefully we all make better choices so we can keep on living it."

"And what if we don't? This all gets taken away?"

She looked at him guiltily. "Well, there is this thing."

"There's a thing now?"

"Relax, the chances of it happening are like, next to impossible." She rolled her eyes. "Which, yeah, for us pretty much dooms it to inevitability. Crap."

"Just. Tell. Me."

"Okay, what we're living in now? It's a split, a seam, an extra stitch. Like when you eat too many peanut butter cups and you rip your pants, you get 'em patched up."

"That only happened once," he mumbled.

"So we got patched up, resewn into this new fabric of reality. Cool, huh?"

Angel shrugged. "It'll do."

"But just like that pair of pants you ended up having to throw away, this fabric is more delicate, unstable. Any little mojo stretching it wrong and we all come unraveled. Then whatever might have been takes over instead."

"Well, what the hell is that?" Angel demanded, feeling hysterical.

Cordelia lifted her hands in the air. "At this point? Who knows? Hell, we could all be dead," she laughed nervously and immediately stopped. "Uh, yeah. Not really funny, sorry."

"So all we have to do is just wait," he said, trying to be reasonable. "You'll get a vision, see what's on the other side of this reality so we know what we're dealing with and why are you shaking your head at me now?"

"That's the other part of my deal. No more visions."

He swallowed with difficulty. "It doesn't matter. You're here, we'll work it out."

"We will," she agreed. "But as it is?" she glanced nervously at the clock on his bedside table. "This message is gonna self-destruct like thirty seconds ago. Angel, I wish..." She smiled through a sudden flash of tears. "God, there's so much more. Oh, the hell with it. One for the road?" And without further hesitation, she pulled him forward and pressed her lips against his.

For a long moment, he couldn't move, couldn't register anything beyond the fact that he finally had the kiss from her that he'd always wanted. Full of love, passion… and the overriding twinge of desperation, which he tried with all his might to kiss away.

"Talk about being worth the wait," she murmured, breaking the kiss slowly. "And I'm afraid you're going to have to wait a while to get one of those again. But we'll get back here, Angel, I swear that we will."

"Cordy?"

She snubbed her nose against his and lay down again, her eyes dancing. "By the way: you're welcome," she chirped before closing her eyes.

"No," he whispered, moving his hands wildly to her throat to check for a pulse. It pounded reassuringly against his fingers, strong and firm. Then what…

Her eyes opened. "Well, hello salty goodness.Aren't you a sight for comatose eyes?"

A lump formed in his throat as he tried to smile at her.

"Thank you."

_Note: Cordy's very familiar bits of dialogue courtesy of "You're Welcome," Angel the Series, Season 5._


	7. Chapter 7

The men met each other halfway in the alley with arms extended for half-hugs and handshakes, a type of greeting recent enough to make them both smile self-consciously.

"How's the private sector these days?" Spike asked.

"They're all poor and so am I," Gunn chuckled. "But nothing beats the good night's sleep I get from a clear conscience."

"And Anne?"

Gunn grinned. "Yeah, she makes for a good night's sleep, too. How's our girl?"

"Good, I think," Spike said. "Yeah, better. I hope." He wondered how many times he had said or thought those exact words and the sentiment of worry and uneasiness behind them.

"She's goin' out on her own yet?"

"All over creation," he mumbled, thinking of the private trip that Fred had taken earlier that day without him and her reticence about it. "Anyway, thanks for meeting up, Charlie. I know you don't need the muscle."

"Out on these streets, no such thing as too much muscle," Gunn replied, swinging the crossbow from behind his back into his hands. "Though I gotta say, didn't expect on you getting out here again so soon."

"Doesn't seem soon."

"Married life getting you down?" Gunn joked, but Spike could see the warning in his eyes for anything that could be read as injury to Fred. _Good on him. _

Spike met his eyes. "Not me. Fred on the other hand…"

"Ah, she gave you the boot," Gunn nodded, understanding.

"Hey!" Spike choked. "We're still together! Not in need of your shelter yet!"

"Nah, man, I mean, she got sick of you bein' under her feet all the time. Don't sweat it, it means she's getting better, ready to take on her life again."

"Right," Spike said softly, keeping these thoughts to himself: that perhaps her life meant a longer time back than he'd been in the picture.

"Look, I know Fred Burkle, and as it is, longer than you -- not better, just longer -- so listen up," Gunn said, slapping a hand on Spike's shoulder. "You got nuthin' to worry about. That girl loves you and take it from me, that ain't a decision she makes overnight."

Spike glanced at him. "He speaketh from experience."

"Yeah," Gunn nodded. "It's no secret I carried the torch for Fred longer than she cared about it bein' lit."

Spike suddenly wanted to hear more about that. "When did you know?" he asked gruffly. "When it wasn't lit from her, that is. She come out and tell you?"

"Fred?" Gunn asked incredulously. "You gotta be kidding. Nah, she worked up to it quiet. On the surface, everything looked tight. But she just kept pulling away, you know? Until one day," he shook his head sadly. "One day, I saw her right next to me but I knew she was gone."

Spike blinked. "Jesus, I'm a selfish fuck. Whingin' to you of all people 'bout Fred."

"It's cool," Gunn shrugged. "I said I carried the torch, didn't say it still smoked."

Spike couldn't help glancing at him. "And does it?"

"Truth?" Gunn walked silently for a few moments. "I didn't like the sound of you from day one. Angel had plenty of stories to tell."

"As he does," Spike sighed.

"Hated it more when I found out how much time you were spending with Fred, even when you didn't have hands to keep to yourself. But you give that girl a problem and she puzzles it out. I remember talking to her on the phone and I could tell she had it in her head that there was no giving up on you."

Spike felt his chest puff a little at that admission.

"Since then," Gunn continued. "Well, shit. I don't have to tell you all that we've been through. Crazy Slayer, car crash, Angel and the amnesia," He shook his head. "One constant in all of it's been you and Fred. You standing by each other. Gives a brother hope." He grinned.

"So we're good?" Spike asked.

"Hell yeah," Gunn nodded. "You carry your own in a fight and some of mine, plus you're always up for a beer and a round of sticks, and no," he looked over at Spike. "I ain't still smokin' for Fred. Besides, can't say it went down bad lookin' at what I got now."

"Annie's a keeper."

"She ain't the only one."

"I know it," Spike muttered, turning the corner of the darkened alley and feeling a strange mixture of comfort and embarrassment. "Now for fuck's sake, let's kill something while I've still got my balls intact."

* * *

Groggily, Buffy sat up on Lorne's velvet settee, cracking her stiff neck from side to side. Not the most comfortable nap in the world, but she'd slept off the afternoon's rum run to awaken refreshed and only slightly embarrassed. 

Lorne came out of his bedroom dressed in a pink leopard skin printed tuxedo and clucking his tongue at her. "Thought for a minute you were going to miss the whole show. Come on, shake a leg and you can be first in line for the happy hour canapé buffet."

"Oh, no," Buffy said, shaking her head resolutely. "Drowned sorrows, check. Time to work some of this off." She glanced up at him. "What time does your hour get happy anyway?"

"Let's see, Tuesday night, so that makes it…" He checked his watch. "Yup, six o 'clock."

"Six!" Buffy shrieked. "Why did you let me sleep so long?"

"See this?" Lorne asked, walking over toward her and pointing to a swelling and discoloration on the tip of his green nose. "My blending skills with the miracle of food coloring and a good base aside – that hit's from you, Slugger."

"I hit you?" she asked in a small voice.

"I attempted to shift your siesta to the comfort of my boudoir but her ladyship wouldn't be moved," Lorne said wryly. "You think I was gonna chance a wake up call after that?"

"Oh, Lorne, I'm so sorry," Buffy said, eyes wide and plaintive. "What can I do to make it up to you? Need a bouncer? You got a preview on how good I am."

"Nah," he chuckled. "This is nothing a little plaster and Spackle won't fix in six to eight weeks' time. I'll mend. Meanwhile, why don't you go out and make the streets safe for my patrons tonight?"

"I'll do that," she nodded. "And thank you, Lorne, for everything," she added gratefully, pecking him with a quick kiss on his cheek that avoided his bruised snout.

Buffy used Lorne's private exit and found herself on the street, down block from the entrance of the club. The simple neon sign, Caritas, had just been lit and Buffy stood for a moment, reflecting on it. Charity? Mercy. Whatever. How different life could've been with this kind of watering hole than one named for third place at the Olympics. Obviously, if Angel had guys like this in his corner, things couldn't be all bad here in LA.

Then she remembered: Lorne had already sprung out of that corner, stat. Along with Charles Gunn and Wesley…

"Who seems to have gotten out of rehab just in time to make Tuesday night happy hour," she murmured, craning her neck down the street when she saw a familiar Wesley-esque figure about to descend the stairs to Caritas' entrance.

"Wes!" she called, jogging down the street, suddenly enervated. The day wouldn't be a total loss. She could meet him in the bar, take his statement on his imprisonment by that slayer…as much as he remembered of it. She halted in her steps. Too much morphine might mean too little memory.

Then a familiar scent drifted in on the wind.

"Uh-oh," she muttered, heading off in the opposite direction. "Sorry, Wes. Former duty calls."

* * *

From the front-row seat his wheelchair afforded him, the withered old demon could not stop watching his own death. 

He surveyed it with the rapt detachment of the spectator he truly was, feeling no ill effects from his on-screen demise. The image fascinated him, the grainy picture in the center of the Orlon Window, how the strange blue woman's fury and the force of her fist exploded his skull into flying fragments of pulp. He watched how his body slumped to join that of the already dead man lying on the floor - his six o'clock appointment in this current reality, one Wesley Wyndham Pryce.

Cyrus Vail smiled at the wonder of alternative realities. If he had his way, Pryce and the rest of his cohorts wouldn't be left alive in any of them.

"You're obsessed with that thing," a young woman's voice said behind him.

He frowned. "You might be well to share my obsession. Perhaps it would spark your flagging interest in what we're trying to accomplish."

"You know, funny thing about throwing the universe out of whack..." Eve sighed, flopping into his plush jacquard couch. "Not as fun as it sounds."

"The fun does not begin, my dear," he hissed. "Until we have earned it. You completed your visit, I take it?"

"Yeah, what was that about?" Eve frowned. "I found that Lindsay McDonald guy you showed me from that box? He didn't know me from Adam," she smirked a little at her pun. "Too busy playing Johnny Cowboy with his little pals all day. The guy's a rodeo clown, not a diabolical genius."

"Yes, well," Vail chuckled. "Some realities are more amusing than others."

"Well, amuse yourself with this," Eve said, her smile disappearing. "I want the Lindsay Mick-Dee you showed me." She pointed to the Orlon Window that Vail had been gazing into. "Big with the tattoos, the evil plan, and the getting fleshy with me."

"All in good time, my sweet," Vail wheezed. "We must put proper parameters in place first. You'd do well to remember that _I_ contacted _you_ - meaning my schedule, my plan." He stared hard at the glowing cube in front of him. "At least in this world."

"That's another thing I don't get," Eve said. She got up from the couch and walked over behind Vail, squinting warily at the screen on his table. "How is it that we can see all of this?"

"I managed to extract the Orlon Window from Wolfram & Hart before their management changed and eliminated me. Unfortunately, without the amulet, its value is diminished."

He turned around and eyed her. "You do not know what Orlon stands for?"

She shook her head.

"Other Realities Lost on Nature. With only the application of a small amount of magic," he waved his hand over the cube and a picture of Eve with an apple, sitting on Angel's desk and grinning prettily, came into view. "I can view versions of the reality we're currently residing in."

"Man, I have the best clothes in that reality," she sighed wistfully.

"In that reality, you die," Vail growled. "Wolfram & Hart collapses on you."

"I know, I know," she said with a roll of her eyes. "And you die and Lindsay dies. I got it."

"My work in creating that boy's new world was ruined. Yet if Angel had never changed his son's outcome, Wolfram & Hart would have continued unchecked. We would have continued, certainly. As underpaid lackeys!" Vail roared, slamming his fist on the desk. "You say I am obsessed for studying the millions of worlds in this window. Without that obsession, I never would have found our opportunity."

They watched together as Angel and Connor came on screen, struggling in the sporting goods store of a shopping mall.

"Angel dies in that one, his son kills him," Eve noted. "Dust to dust, baby."

"Yes," Vail murmured. "I have also learned that the one constant in every world in which we, too, exist is Connor. Here he's a criminal, a murderer. But he's acquitted, on account of his insanity. Even here, the son of the vampire with a soul lives."

Eve met his eyes. "So he's our key?"

"The amulet is our key. The amulet will allow us to move through the window's worlds at our bidding, extract individuals at our behest – such as the Lindsey I have enamored you of – and its destruction will seal whatever changes we make. No, Connor," Vail grinned evilly. "Connor is merely one of our pawns -- along with the rest of them."

"So what do you say, boss," Eve whispered, working her hands into a strong massage of Vail's tight, thin shoulders. "I think it's time for our first move."

"Ah, yes, Wesley. You'll help me dress, won't you, dear?" he leaned back into her touch, closing his eyes. "I don't wish to keep our first player waiting."

* * *

"Well, ain't this old home week," Lorne said from behind the bar as Wesley entered the still-empty club. 

"Hello, Lorne," Wes greeted him with a grin. "I know it's been a while."

"I'll see your 'in a while' and raise you a 'in a dog's age,'" he said, holding out his hand for Wesley to shake. "Didn't know I'd be hosting the whole Sunnydale hit parade tonight."

Wes shook back. "I'm sure I don't know what you mean."

"You just missed Ms. Short Blonde and Punchy," he said, rubbing his nose gingerly. "Look under Slayer, Vampire, Buffy the?"

"Buffy Summers was here?" Wesley said in true surprise. "What on earth for?"

"Officially? Council interest in the dead nutjob who tried to kill us both."

"Oh, yes, of course," Wes nodded. "The Council of Watchers is required to investigate all slayer-related activities. Especially their murders. So Buffy's working for the Council now," he mused. "That's interesting and…somehow terrifying." He glanced at Lorne. "You said officially. Something unofficial about her business?"

Lorne hesitated. "I gotta say, I took a shine to the kid. Still, I think she took on the Council biz as a big ole means to what she hoped would be her vamp-happy-ending."

"Really?" Wes murmured. "You mean she came after Angel?" His heart quickened with hope. "Or Spike?"

"You spare a nickel? I'll flip."

"Oh, dear," Wesley replied. "That must have made for a rather emotional visit. For all parties concerned." He looked over at Lorne with a detached interest. "Any idea how it turned out?"

"Well, she came in alone and unhappy and cleaned me out of coconut rum," Lorne said, mixing two Sea Breezes and holding out a glass to Wes. "You wanna drink to that?"

"No," he sighed glumly. "I suppose I'd rather not."


	8. Chapter 8

Wesley glanced at his watch. A minute before six o'clock. Still time to change his mind.

Instead, he drained the gratis pink cocktail in two quick gulps. He followed with a paid-for scotch on the rocks, merely to cleanse the palate, of course. He stared forwards dully, past his tired eyes reflected in the wall of mirrors behind the bar and to the crowd behind him. In the reflection, he saw demons and humans dancing to the piped-in music, groups of friends carousing, milling around the buffet table, embracing, laughing, and enjoying themselves in a way that Wesley could not touch. Still, he could not help glancing at the reflection with a small smile. Lorne had returned to his LA roots without as much as a pause and had likewise returned to his former success, even without his gift of reading. If he missed it, he certainly put on a good show to prove otherwise.

Then again, Wes thought bitterly, haven't we all?

"It almost looks real, doesn't it?" said a familiar voice behind him: the mysterious stranger from the telephone call.

Wesley stared in the mirror and saw no one at his side. Likewise, he saw no one out of the corner of his eye.

"It is real," Wes answered with a sigh. "All of that is happening in this room. It's just…beyond me." He turned around and saw the pitifully shriveled and balding demon that had spoken.Wes tried not to draw back in revulsion when the man held out his hand – a scrawny, skeletal claw with skin like cracked leather and in the color of fresh blood.

He latched on to Wes' hand that rested by his side before Wes had a chance to react and instantly felt his body lurch inside from the iciness of the man's grip. And from his power. Wesley had rarely felt such a surge of magical energy from a mere touch. It hit him like the sudden rush of a drug, leaving him enervated and slightly sick. The release of the handshake brought him relief and disappointment both.

"Greetings, Mr. Pryce. I must say that it is a pleasure to meet you at last. Your reputation, as it is said, precedes you." He laughed, a vacant and dismal sound that echoed chillingly in Wesley's ears.

"You know me," Wes frowned. "How exactly?"

The two burly demons who served as bodyguards glared at Wesley menacingly, kept their hairy paws clutched to the handles of the old demon's wheelchair. The chair had been outfitted with a kind of intricate IV system, though the rusty and mustard-colored liquids looked nothing like the healing hospital fluids Wes had ever seen. Or, he shuddered internally, nothing like what Leah had administered to him.

The man waved his hand as though in dismissal. "It is the obligation of any decent sorcerer to know his competition. You've done the odd spell in your time, young man, with more success than you'll admit." One eye winked up at him.

Wes stiffened. "You're a sorcerer."

"Cyvus Vail, son, and don't bother with a pleasant lie that you've heard of me. You haven't. I have taken great pains to make sure of it."

Wesley clapped his mouth shut.

"Are you ready to discuss business?" Vail asked.

"I'm afraid we've met at a bad time," Wes murmured, feeling a bead of sweat form on his forehead. He hadn't been prepared for meeting someone like Vail. It would be like doing business with the devil.

He cleared his throat and gestured around the room. "It appears that this is Caritas' busiest hour. We'll never find a quiet corner, never mind a table."

Vail snorted. "Is that the greatest of your concerns? When I spoke to you on the phone, I identified this as the ideal time for our meeting. Do you wish to see why?"

Without waiting for Wesley to answer, Vail lifted his hands in the air, palms to the ceiling. In a flash, one of the last empty chairs slid across the room to Wesley's side – right before an attractive brunette in a gray business suit was about to sit in it.

Her eyes narrowed at Wes and Vail. "Hey!" she began, in a petulant tone.

Wesley didn't hear the rest of what she had to say. In fact, he stopped hearing anything in the room at all. Everyone and everything had come to a complete standstill.

"You still wish to have a table?" the old demon hissed.

Wes shook his head.

"Please," Vail said, gesturing to the empty chair in front of him. "You see that we have all the privacy in the world now."

"What –" Wes stammered, easing himself carefully into the chair. "Whatever have you done?"

"A mere temporal disturbance. You'd be surprised how often they happen. Oh, the patrons are fine. But I needed their energy to bring about this little pause."

"Energy. You sought out this crowd."

"Yes," Vail nodded. "Humans especially buzz with all that your minds and bodies never accomplish, never knowing what you are capable of. You're living batteries." He did not smile. Wesley knew that Vail completely believed in his theory. His magic depended on it.

"What do you want?"

Vail snickered. "A man who gets right to the point. Not interested in the sorcery necessary to bring about a hiatus in time, are you? Very well. But it is not just a matter of what I want, but what you want. I believe her name is Winifred Burkle."

"Now see here," Wesley leaned over to the man, after first glancing upwards to make sure that Vail's bodyguards were likewise suspended in time. "I won't be party to any kind of blackmail. You threaten Miss Burkle or her safety in any way and you die now."

"And you perish here in this limbo with me," Vail yawned. "Mr. Pryce, save your petty intimidation for the likes of Wolfram & Hart. What we will arrange here is an exchange." He rustled in his thick maroon robes for a moment and produced a glowing cube, made of some kind of translucent material – something like frosted glass crossed with cotton sheeting.

"When I asked whether this looked real, I didn't mean the reflection. Unless to say, that we are the reflection even outside of the mirror. We are trapped in a living mirror, a reflection of reality that has almost been lost to us." His eyes glinted. "Almost. Take a look. See for yourself."

What Wesley saw next could have been downloaded from his deepest, most personal dreams. Fred, beautiful Fred, standing before him with eyes turned up at him – him at last! – wearing a look of utter infatuation.

"You're just going to go, aren't you?" she asked him, wide-eyed and full of obvious anguish at his apparent retreat toward a door. How the Wesley in that screen could not know what she laid bare before him, he couldn't fathom. Then again, the man in that world looked as stricken by Fred as he himself had felt in this world, so many times.

"Fred – " the Wesley-on-screen started, his voice full of sense and sensibility. Practicality. Fear.

"Haven't you been... sensing anything lately... about me... coming from me? Uh... didn't occur to you that... something might have changed? That—I'm looking at you in a different— Oh, screw it," she gasped finally and leaned into him with hands on his cheeks, drawing him toward what looked like the sweetest kiss he'd ever felt. As he watched himself with Fred, he felt his lips tingle from the ghost lips of hers lingering on his…sometime, somewhere...

"Do you wish to see more?" Vail asked.

"Yes," Wesley breathed, unable to tear his eyes away. He caught himself. "I mean, no." He shook his head and the images faded from the screen. He scowled at Vail. "What lovely magic you do."

Cyvus Vail laughed then – an utterance of horrifying amusement that quickly degenerated into a phlegm-lodged, choking cough.

"Oh, my boy," he wheezed. "You truly do not know the half of it. But I assure you, the only magic I perform on this cube is your ability to see what exists on the plane outside of our own. A plane where I am a respected employee of Wolfram & Hart and you are the beloved beau of Winifred Burkle. We've been shafted, you and I. We're living in a mirror world. And a funhouse mirror at that. Or what else would you call her lover? That bleached blonde, faux-Cockney, nicotine-ridden, foul-mouthed vampire?"

"Spike," Wes muttered, all of his anger and disappointment poured into that one word. A thought then occurred to him. "What is he to her there?"

"A friend. A confidante. Nothing more." His voice dropped. "Much like you are here."

Wesley eyed the demon suspiciously. He had no reason to discount anything Vail said – and had no reason to believe him, either. He rubbed his eyes tiredly. "How does this even exist?"

Vail smacked his lips with pleasure. "You remember Connor now, do you not?"

Wes looked up at him with a sudden realization. "Yes, I do."

"His new life with new memories, concealing all that you knew of him and he of himself, that was my creation. Or should I say, my distortion. It was meant to be a simple glamour, a mere ripple in the fabric of time." He leveled Wesley with a chilling stare. "It took on a life of its own."

Vail gestured up to the bar, to the bottle of scotch that the bartender had placed next to Wesley's glass after refilling it. "Go on. Drink."

Wesley obeyed.

"Any ordinary human or demon boy would have enjoyed his life in suburbia, ensconced with his replacement family, happily ever after, as they say. Never to give pause to his roots, to his true horrific nature," Vail continued. "Connor, as I think you recall, is not your ordinary boy."

"No," Wes said softly, draining his glass and filling it again. "He never was that." He sunk into the chair.

"He is stronger than I – than any of us anticipated. His pretty mist of happy memories still lingers but not for long. And when it lifts, I promise you, Mr. Pryce, the result will pour a flood of chaos upon us all, the likes of which you have not seen. Your tussles with the Beast," he chuckled, "will be a puppet show in comparison."

Wesley's lips turned dry. "You want—you're asking me to kill Connor?"

"No!" Vail croaked. "The die has been cast. Killing him will only seal the destruction. You see, Mr. Pryce, we all exist here but for him. When he remembers who – and what he is – this world ceases to hold purpose. We will bleed away into the worst sort of apocalypse. The end of a world that never should have been."

Wesley dragged his eyes to the now dim cube resting in Vail's lap.

"What about the world you showed me there?" he couldn't help himself from asking.

Vail met his gaze eagerly. "I can facilitate it for you to go back, back far enough to change Angel's mind. Back to the precise moment that he chose to whitewash his son's life and take over Wolfram & Hart. That is what you have seen: a world without Connor, a world in which Fred Burkle loves you. Without any need for this glamour, everything here as you see it will also revert to its true nature, the world I have shown you in that screen. All of this here will disappear as a dream upon waking."

"You've shown me roughly thirty seconds of a kiss," Wesley said flatly. "I'm required to make a decision on the future of an entire dimension based on half a minute and a kiss?"

Vail winked at him. "Mere mortals have destroyed universes for less."

"You're very likely lying. Whatever could you want in exchange?"

"As I said to you on the telephone, what is mine, although it belongs to me as much as it belongs to you. Secreted in the vaults of Wolfram & Hart, Angel has hidden away the one gem that allows the average human demonologist or part-time wizard the ability to cross time and dimensions. Ask your dear friend, Ms. Burkle, if perhaps she has seen it. It is our key for ending this lie we are living." He shook his head. "I merely wish to undo what I have so foolishly done. I am too weak and sick to make such a journey myself. It was in my best interest, you see, to choose a man who has so much to potentially gain. And lose."

"You're a sorcerer," Wesley spat out. "You're a former employee of Wolfram & Hart which means an untold propensity for evil."

"You see? We share so much in common."

Affronted, Wes jumped up and pushed his chair back.

"We have both done our share of evil deeds. This world," he nodded gravely, "is the whole of their parts. The ultimate forgery. The consummate fabrication. It will end, as surely as we speak here now. The question remains of how you wish it to end? Embracing the love of your life or listening to her screams of death?"

"Enough," Wesley held his hand up, watching it tremble. "I have heard quite enough from you."

"You have," Vail agreed. "Now you must hear from others. Listen to any hints from them that this life and all in it has left them somewhat…betrayed." He returned the glowing cube to the folds of his cloak. "Take all the time you wish, Mr. Pryce. That's all that you have to bargain with, is time."

Wesley heard the snap of fingers and in the next instant, the flood of sound and activity of the bar returned to him in a dizzying rush. He glanced at his watch to see it reading a minute past six o'clock, not a second more. The bottle of scotch still rested next to his glass, although his ice cubes were now dry. He glanced around him but Vail and his guards had disappeared.

Frowning, he wondered how much he had merely imagined of it all. Foolishly drinking following his morphine detox had to cause some side effects, hallucinations couldn't be the least of them. He'd get out of Caritas quickly before the real man on the telephone had a chance to arrive.

"Hey, jerk-off," an annoyed female voice came from across the room. A ticked-off brunette in a gray business suit strode toward him, pointing at the floor. "No need to magic it up, Potter. You want a chair, all you have to do is ask."

Flustered, Wesley looked down to see the club chair at his knees, blocking his exit. The same chair that Vail had spirited over for him during their supposedly imaginary conversation.

"Terribly sorry," Wes stammered. He pushed the chair out of his path and made his way to the door. "I'm afraid I've made a horrible mistake."

_Notes: Wes/Fred dialogue from the AtS episode, Smile Time._

"_As a dream upon waking," a snippet from "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"_


	9. Chapter 9

Spike and Gunn lapsed into a comfortable silence as they patrolled Charles' usual route of back streets and blind alleys. Something, though, did not set well with Spike – not the company, but something amiss in the air.

"It's quiet," he said finally. "Too quiet."

"Been thinkin' the same thing," Gunn muttered. "I don't get it. Month or so back, I had a couple of close calls out here, the vamps were so thick."

Spike glanced at him. "You never told me that."

Gunn shrugged. "You had better things goin' on. But that's what makes it so off. Where are they all?"

Tipping his head back, Spike took a read on the air. "Something's here. Or well on its way."

"Thing like a demon?"

"Not a demon. Not a human either." Then Spike rolled his eyes at the obviousness of the scent. "Just a bird halfway in between with a taste for expensive Italian shampoo."

Heels clipped out of the shadows.

"Spike?"

"Slayer."

"Wow," grunted Gunn.

"What are you doing out here?"

"Same as you, I reckon, makin' the streets safe for bloody humanity," Spike replied. "Thought you had riddle-solving to play on the Watchers' dime."

"Yeah, I met with Lorne earlier and then my Slay-dar went off like whoa." Buffy eyed him cautiously. "Now I guess I know why."

"Looks like you are the only vamp out tonight," Gunn said, glancing around.

"Out here? You gotta be kidding," Buffy said and then stuck out her hand. "Sorry. Buffy Summers."

Their palms met. "Yeah, figured that out already or would've by your grip," Gunn winced. "Charles Gunn."

"Oh, yeah, okay. You're on my list, too."

"List?"

"Next in line to answer what has become the question of the week, that being: where were you on the afternoon of Leah Morgan's murder?"

Gunn glanced at Spike before answering. "Laid up in a hospital bed with a leg broken in three places and a totaled company car."

"God, the car accident, that's right." Buffy shook her head. "That could've been really harsh – not that a broken leg isn't but…"

"Could've been worse," Gunn nodded. "I heard it."

"So whatever you heard about the death of that Slayer came second hand, I get that," Buffy said. "But is there something you'd like to say for the record?"

Gunn's expression eased into blankness. "I heard she got what was coming to her. Worked for me."

"I can't believe you people!" Buffy cried, throwing her hands up. "A Slayer dies, and no one thinks to ask for details?"

"Maybe we're all a bit jaded on that subject, pet," Spike said lowly.

"Yeah, well, this girl isn't coming back," Buffy snapped. She took a breath and swallowed. "Not that I necessarily think that's a bad thing. Off the record."

The three of them huddled together, the silence between them practically creaking with their shared discomfort. Buffy looked especially thrown, with her eyes flitting back and forth as though afraid to let her gaze settle on Spike for too long. One of these moments, in another time, he'd seek to comfort her, ply her with a joke or even a caress – never knowing, of course, how he'd be received. Sometimes he'd earn a shared smile, or maybe a bruising, forceful kiss. Other times still, she'd punch him in the face, wholly unprovoked except in his affection of her. And as lovely as she looked in the moonlight and on her guard, he had to admit that he certainly didn't miss _that_.

"Well," Buffy cleared her throat. "You guys can go. I'll take it from here." She looked over at Gunn. "Bones are still healing, right? Walking out here all night can't be a party."

"I manage," he frowned, shifting his weight from one leg to the other. "Thing is, there's no action tonight, 'cept for him."

"I can't believe that Spike's all I picked up on."

Spike glared at her. "Hey!"

"No offense. But from the little I remember of LA, this part of town used to be vamp central."

"Not lately," Gunn said. "I switch my patrols, you know. Map 'em out, different neighborhood every night. Every night, I'm goin' out farther to get a kill. It's almost like what would be huntin' me is gettin' hunted, too. Only worse."

Buffy met Spike's eyes at that comment.

"You didn't tell me that part of the story, either, Charlie-boy."

"Didn't think about it before."

"Well, think about it now," Buffy said. "What do we know that scares demons as much as they scare humans?"

Gunn drew himself up to his full height. "They know I've got it goin' on!"

"Besides that," Buffy smiled.

"A Slayer, that's the obvious," Spike said. "But you just got here. Think it's a baby Slayer troop makin' their first rounds?"

"I can give, with all kinds of authority, a big negative on that theory. We managed to catch up with just about all the California Slayers, got them in training." Buffy looked sad for a moment. "Almost all of them." She shook her head. "Anyway, I don't sense any Slayer juice, do you? So what else?"

Spike felt the inevitability of the situation descend on them like a fog.

"Only other thing I got, I know you don't want."

"No." She pressed her lips together and shook her head from side to side. "Don't. Don't say it."

Gunn looked wildly at each of them. "What? What is it?"

Buffy choked the words out. "The First."

"Oh, sure, you get to say it."

"The huh?" Gunn asked.

"The First, as in the original, primary, accept-no-substitutes Evil," Spike answered, producing a cigarette from his pocket and lighting up. "Which would mean a world of dead Slayers, old family ghosts on parade, and an apocalypse to cap the whole sodding shebang. If it's true."

"And we're not saying it is," Buffy interjected quickly. "It's just a theory."

Spike smirked. "Seein' how those always work out so well..."

"You mean the thing you pulled a whole town on you to stop?" Gunn asked, nudging Spike. "That First Evil?"

"One and the same."

Gunnpaced for a few nervous seconds. "I guess I'm not alone in thinkin' that LA might leave a bigger mark."

"Might singe a few more hairs," Spike muttered, running a hand over his scalp. "It crossed my mind, yeah."

"No," Buffy said. "It won't happen. Not again. Not here. Not after…everything."

"'Fraid your wishin' on it won't make it any less real."

"I refuse to count any chickens before they're rotisseried. This patrol ends now. We rally the gang, or however many are rallyable in this area code, and we strategize starting tomorrow."

"You always like this?" Gunn asked.

"Yes," Spike answered. "She is."

Buffy shot both men a sour look. "Let's just say I've had a lot of practice at this. Too much."

"All right," Gunn sighed. "Gotta side with the lady's experience." He began to walk out of the alley. "We goin'?"

"You two go. I'll make a quick round." She turned on her heel and headed deeper into the alley.

It took Spike only a moment to glance at her retreating back.

"Like hell you will!"

* * *

Fred picked up her purse and dumped the contents on the living room floor. Again. 

Lipstick, compact, wallet, checkbook, keys, cell phone, empty prescription bottle, three gel ink pens…clearly, no notebook. No small leather-bound notebook that had been her constant companion these last few weeks. Its loss hit harder than she would have expected from some material object. Yet it had come to mean a great deal to her beyond its surface value. And she'd lost it. _Just like everything else._

"Ohh, no," she moaned softly, sinking to her knees on the floor. "It can't be gone. It just can't."

For the past month, she'd kept what passed for a miniature version of formulas on walls in this notebook secreted in her purse. Spike had thought that she'd simply gotten better, hadn't needed the dry erase boards that he'd bought for her recovery. Gradually, she had stopped using them and started using the notebook instead. While the white boards became less scribbled upon, Spike brightened more every day. No coincidence, his happiness, no further testing necessary on that result. So she told him to take them down and from the look of relief on his face, she knew she'd made the right decision.

Until now.

A small section of that same notebook had also held times, addresses, names and observations regarding one Connor Riley and his daily whereabouts. With every covert visit, she'd gathered more information, more evidence that the selective amnesia they'd all suffered hadn't yet left Connor – the operative word here being "yet." Any change to his systematic schedule-keeping bordering on the obsessive (laundry every Monday, library on Tuesday, groceries every Wednesday, beer run every Thursday, pizza every Friday, movies on Saturday, dinner with the family on Sunday), Fred would be the first to know. Or she would have been the first to know, had she not conveniently lost her notebook.

"I'll start over," she whispered. "And this time I'll tell Spike. Maybe he can even help me. We'll go visit Connor together and he'll know all of the wonderful things about this beautiful boy that all of us were never supposed to remember."

The tears came hard and fast then, not just for Connor, but this whole cycle of loss that continued to spin them all like an out-of-control centrifuge. Cordy had gone, Spike had returned; Lilah's sister had blown through their lives to rain her destruction down and left just as quickly, paving the way for Buffy to appear in her wake; Connor had been erased from them all, even erased from himself. Would he, too, return or augur the arrival of someone else? Something worse, perhaps…

All at once a weight of exhaustion settled over Fred's eyelids as though she'd been slipped a sleeping pill, causing her to reel in unexpected dizziness. She stumbled to her feet, then to the bedroom and threw herself prostrate on the mattress, her body succumbing instantly to sleep.


	10. Chapter 10

"Hello, Fred, how are you doing?" Wesley murmured, cradling the headset of the phone against his shoulder. "Yes, this is Wesley, I've just returned from Palm Springs and I've had the most interesting experience that I really must share with you as soon as possible. Are you free this evening? Or tomorrow, perhaps? For what? Oh, merely the end of the world. Again. They certainly don't get any easier, do they?"

He slammed the phone down. All the practice in the world couldn't prepare him for what he had to say.

Ridiculous to think that he could have a conversation like that with Fred – any conversation, actually, come to think of it. Their friendship had been strained since she'd begun working with Spike (it was easier, thinking of them as still working together) and he couldn't begin to think of how to approach her. But the information he'd received this evening, questionable though it seemed, gave Wesley a convenient excuse to make a long-overdue contact. Certainly he'd give Fred all the details he could on this sorcerer named Vail and share with her the fantastic story about Angel's deal with Wolfram & Hart. Perhaps she'd need his help – her vampire couldn't help Fred at every hour of the day, could he? – and it certainly didn't hurt that they both had shared such intimate memories of Connor. Both Wes and Fred had in their own ways shaped the boy and his demise. An odd subject for old friends to bond over but then what about anything that happened hadn't been odd?

"No," Wesley said aloud.

He'd be allowing himself to get used – only this time not by Angel but by Vail – and then using Fred right back. Oh, Vail wanted to make him think that it was the information that was being manipulated but Wesley knew better. He'd still have to find a way to convince Fred to get the amulet for him and then a way to get it to Vail. And then crossing dimensions? He couldn't think of how Holtz must have done it, with the tiny bundle of Connor in his arms, how he hadn't even hesitated but grabbed the baby and jumped blindly. As much as Wesley wanted to believe in the lie of this world and all the pain they'd suffered in it, he couldn't shake its reality.

He ran his fingers over his dry lips that still held Fred's lost kiss, feeling that sleep must be still many hours away.

* * *

"Buffy."

"I told you I've got it."

"Look, there's nothing here to get."

She stood still. "I'm not convinced of that."

For some reason, the resolute set of her stance in that alleyway made him burn with anger. It was as though she was trying to prove something to him – to herself, too – that she wouldn't be running away from this fight. Not the one from the First – God, it couldn't be all that again, could it?—but from him. How could he begin to explain to her how late she really was?

He stalked back up the alleyway and leaned into her face. "When I say there's nothing here, I mean no vamps, no reason for a hunt. Read between another set of lines, pet."

"I know what you meant," she said coolly.

"So where's the law office from here then?"

Buffy looked around furtively. "What do you mean?"

"Or your hotel. Basic pointing will do. Which way?"

She stared at him, and then pointed a defiant finger over his shoulder. He chuckled.

"Maybe from bloody Seattle, love. This city ain't been yours for years and it shows. I'm not gonna leave you alone out here when simple sense of direction still doesn't come part of your Slayer package."

"Like you care."

Spike stopped short. "How's that?"

"Go home, Spike. Home to your girl. Leave the Slaying to us."

"You think I've lost the fight, just 'cause I'd rather keep you safe? Not see you get torn to bits means I've gone soft? Or," he bit on the words, "you just looking to get a beating to spite me?"

"You won't know," Buffy replied airily. "You're leaving."

"Not without you."

"Try me."

He grinned in spite of himself. "Gladly."

They traded quick blows, first lightly, both of them easing into their familiar physical banter and enjoying the game of it. Then each one began daring the other to play a little harder. The punches landed with more force, were blocked with more of a push, until finally he caught her in a mid-flip as she aimed her boots at his chest, spun her legs and threw them over his shoulder.

"Out we go!" he sang while she rained her fists on his back.

"Spike! Put me down!" She struggled against him violently, thrashing against his legs and throwing him off balance, tumbling them both to the pavement.

"OW!"

They bumped heads to elbows and knees, winding up tangled together with her rolled on top of him and breathing heavily.

"I didn't plan this," he protested, gearing up for the next round of their fight.

"Neither did I."

Forget how she clung to him, how her body eased into his like the first clasp of a practiced waltz. Forget how she smelled, all angry and piquant, the subtle differences mixed with the familiar. The new splash of Europe on her wrists and in her hair, on the surface of her clothes could not mask the true core scent that he would always associate with her. Forget her he had, but it all came rushing back with her arms and legs entwined with his.

They lay like that for several agonizing seconds. Finally, his senses clearing, he took her arms and gave her a small shove.

"Up you go," he said, averting his eyes from the pain in her face. "Patrol all night if you have a mind to."

"That's what you think this is about? Patrolling?" She stood up and swatted her hair back. "If we're up against the First again for real? I have to know, Spike. I have to know now and I have to do something about it because if it rises again, it's going to be me to beat it back into the ground. Not you."

"Right," he sneered. He pushed himself up with the flats of his palms, brushing the gravel off his pant legs as he stood up. "Slayer's privilege, she can't save the world without her bloody cheering section."

"No!" she cried. "Because I won't bury you again, Spike, okay? Not ever, ever again!" Buffy put her face in her hands and sobbed. "I can't lose you like that a second time. I won't."

Spike bent his head forward, cringing at her tears. If he put a hand on her shoulder at this moment, he'd get the kiss instead of the punch. That part of her, at least, was predictable.

"Buffy, I'm here. Always seem to come back. Like a bad penny, yeah?"

"Me too," she sniffled.

"Whatever this is, we'll fight it like we've always done. Got Angel to rope in for this one. And Win, of course."

Buffy stiffened and flashed an even stiffer smile. "Of course." She turned away from him.

"Look away from it all you like. You need to know, Slayer," Spike said to her back, "that whatever's comin' down, Fred'll be by my side and she'll do her part."

"Sure, Spike," Buffy said weakly. "I know it seems that way now."

"Seems to be because it is."

"Spike." Buffy shook her head. "The big battles do weird things to people. You've seen it."

"Felt it on occasion as well."

"Then you know…"

"I know Fred. Look, when I first came back, you could say I got my ideal sentence. All I ever had was me. Came back, didn't even that. 'No-body,' no 'matter,'" he grinned at his puns. "No interaction. But Win always saw me. Saw me clean through – not like that was hard. But she grounded me. Took me in before I had a body, before she even knew I'd have a soul. Took me exactly as I was. Then," he smiled in reflection. "Took me."

"God, Spike," Buffy grimaced. "I thought we were talking about life and death here. Could you be any more of a pig?"

"I love her!" he bellowed in sudden fury and frustration. "What's more life and death about that? So would you leave off at it? Stop making me bloody explain myself? Stop making me say things that come out wrong?"

Buffy's sudden steps spoke louder than any response, quick flicking heels that breezed by his side, carrying her away from him and out of the alley.

Spike trudged out of the maze of littered asphalt pathways, finally meeting Gunn back where they had parked their cars earlier that evening.

"We gone?"

"Yeah." Spike looked around. "Happen to see any brassed-off Slayers?"

Gunn pointed to Spike's car, to the female silhouette in the passenger's seat.

Spike passed a tired hand over his eyes. "Right."

"You want me to drive her instead?"

"More than you know. But she's here because of me. Or how she thinks on it anyway. Best own up to it." He paused at Gunn's quizzical look. "Buffy hasn't interviewed Fred yet and if I work it right, she'll never have to."

Gunn's eyes widened briefly and then relaxed into grudging admiration. "So you're gonna take the heat for that slayer."

"That's the plan. In the meanwhile, do us a favor? Ring Fred, tell her to expect me home in about half and hour?"

Gunn grinned. "You got it."

Buffy did not speak when Spike entered the car, nor did she open her mouth when he started the engine and rolled the car onto the freeway. He knew this routine: she had bared her all to him; it was his turn to give something back. Knowing all the moves didn't make it any less of a trial. Exhausting she was and oh, how he once had ached to be so tired.

Now he merely wanted rest.

"Where to?" he asked.

Buffy gave him a sidelong glance. "Where are _you_ going?"

"Home. It's late."

"Fine. The hotel then. Next exit, then left."

He turned to look at her. "You're really going to go your hotel, not double back and go wandering about on your own?"

She held up two fingers in a mock peace sign. "Slayer Scout's honor. Which reminds me…"

He tried not to sigh. "Surprised you waited this long, Slayer."

"Spike, what happened? Self-defense, right? It's okay. I just need the whole story on how you killed her. Details. Times. Places. The full Law & Order spiel."

"Right," he sighed. "We fought, she lost, she died. The end."

"That explanation never cuts it. Especially not now."

He glanced over at her, curiosity piqued. "What's any different about now?"

"There's a new Watcher's Council, Spike. I work for them. You having a soul and still killing a slayer, well, it's like you're flipping off everything they fight for, everything they stand for."

"She was psychotic," Spike argued. "She could have killed us all. Nearly bloody did."

"I know. That's why I'm interviewing everyone. To give you a real case."

Spike screeched to a halt in front of Buffy's Hilton.

"You saying I'm on trial here?"

"I won't lie to you. There's a very good chance of that. Depending on what the results of my interviews are, what everyone has to say..."

"And you were going to tell me this when?"

"I'm telling you now. That's why it's more important than ever that you talk to me-- that everyone who was there does. The sooner they do, the sooner this will be all over."

"And the sooner you're gone," he added. Seeing her stricken expression, he attempted a smile. "Didn't mean that as it came out, love."

"Sure," she smiled awkwardly. "Talk to me tomorrow? We've got huge work to do." He nodded and she got out of the car. He floored the accelerator out of the driveway, his mind firmly fixed on the only place he wanted to be.


	11. Chapter 11

Their apartment at midnight. Dark, quiet, almost lying in wait for him.

"Win?"

Spike peeked into the living area, then the kitchen. The master bedroom door stood wide open with the bed still made. Had she gone out? He pulled off the t-shirt that reeked of another woman, balled it up and threw it across the room.

A pair of slim, warm hands glided up his back and across his chest.

His breath caught and his eyes closed. The hands slid further down, unlatching his belt buckle, undoing the top button of his jeans, and pulling his zipper down with delicate ease.

"Did you hunt?" Fred whispered huskily.

"Yeah," he panted. Her hands slipped beneath his jeans and began to stroke him.

"Did you catch?"

"No," he shuddered, leaning into the warm insistent kneading of her fingers against his flesh, already hardening and lengthening for her.

"Don't you want to catch?" she asked, her hushed voice turning girl-like and teasing.

He bent his head backwards, trying to feel for her mouth. "Oh, yeah, baby. I do."

"Then come and get me." The hands retreated from his body and her warmth disappeared with a soft rustle of movement.

Stepping out of his jeans, his eyes adjusting to the dark, he looked behind him and sniffed the air. She'd just left the room. All his senses prickled with excitement and suspense. He knew he'd catch her, only a question of when, how long she'd let the game draw out.

She'd stripped out of her clothes, which made her scent that much more ripe and strong. Toeing open the closet door, he leaned in and breathed the musk from her clothes, which had mixed with different extracts of her perfume. She'd bathed this night, earlier. He could still feel the steam in the air. Perhaps she had wanted him to find her in the bath. He stepped in the hallway and the tang of her lavender bath salts hit his tongue.

"Fresh clean girl," he whispered, locking her scent into his nostrils, into his head and letting it rock all the way down to his pelvis. God, he couldn't wait to take her.

He inched along the hallway on bare feet. So little use for him to be stealthy these days, to exercise any of the talents his nature afforded him. Fred somehow knew this and devised this excursion to satisfy those needs. She'd devised this art of prowl and capture, honed it, and made him wait for it and seek it out. One night, he'd found her on the roof, another night on the balcony. Each chase different in its variance, yet all shared the same explosive ending.

Padding into the living room, he got down on hands and knees. She hadn't gone far this night. This is how she got what she wanted, too. Her experiment, her control group, she spun it into motion and let it go, let him react. She wanted it just as much. He could smell it, heavy and thick as a cloud.

He crawled around to the back of the couch, into the nook of where it bowed away from the wall and found her lying in wait there, curled up, deliciously naked, eyes squeezed shut and hands drawn up to her chin. Licking his lips, he darted his hand out and encircled her ankle.

"Lookie what I caught."

Her body jumped at the sudden contact. Her breath caught and he could feel the sweat break out on her body.

"Y-you found me."

"Don't I always? 'Fraid you don't hide very well, love."

"I do," she breathed, eyes now wide and taking him in. "Just not with you. I wanna be caught."

"Do you now…"

"By you," she amended, lying back on the hard wood floor. "Only by you."

His tongue darted out, moistening his lips and she sighed at the sight of it. He looked down at the ankle he held bound, massaged up the calf and settled under the knee, gently prying her thighs open.

"Do you mean it?"

"Yes," she whispered, pulling him down to her with her hand grasped in the back of his hair. "Oh, yes, Spike, I mean it, I'll always mean it."

He bit his lip, winked. "Let's see."

With an insistent tug, he pulled her closer, her moist skin squeaking along the floorboards. His left hand sought hers, clamped down on it, and keeping her wrist bound, he released her leg, then pressed his body into hers with a slow and maddening patience.

"Love you, Win. Love you so much."

"Oh, yeah?" she challenged and arched her back up to him. "Show me."

And in that instant, any trace worry about a trial, a slayer, or an impending apocalypse disappeared.

* * *

The dark-haired woman closed the door to the downstairs bedroom behind her with a soft click to the latch. 

"She's resting now."

"Thank God," Angel breathed. "I'm sorry, for calling so early. And on such short notice."

"Sorry?" she repeated as though the word puzzled her. "I suppose I should be flattered. What's a 5 am wakeup call when you haven't seen or heard from your only daughter in over a year?"

Angel winced. Truly, he hadn't known what else to do. Cordy had slept some through the night but had grown increasingly agitated that "one of Buffy Summers' weird-ass monster hunters" remained so glued to her side, while her parents and all evidence of Sunnydale seemed so dangerously remote. So he used, once again, the resources of Wolfram & Hart – this time to find the former-Mrs. Chase ensconced in a converted ranch on the dead end cul-de-sac of suburban Reseda.

"We haven't been close the last few years," Mrs. Chase continued, crossing the hallway to the modest dining table where Angel sat. He could tell by her agitation that she wouldn't join him. "Actually, that's a lie. We were never close. Until his arrest and fine for tax evasion, Cordelia had a better relationship with my ex-husband."

"Yes, that's right, Mr. Chase. Do you think…do you know…I mean…it would mean a lot to Cordy if she could see him again."

The woman nodded as she paced, a shaking hand retreating into a robe pocket and fingering a worn gilt case before tapping a cigarette free. "Yes," she murmured. "I imagine that it would."

She lit the cigarette from the lighter imbedded into the side of the case and inhaled deeply. The other trembling hand pulled the gap of her purple silk night robe over the neck of her overly tanned and freckled chest. Angel imagined that he could see some of Cordy's haughty good looks from this woman: the same shade of chestnut hair, only with faint flecks of gray where the coloring had begun to bleed out. High cheekbones, flickering brown eyes, stubborn and regal chin. Yet where laugh lines and hard lessons learned had softened her daughter's face, Mrs. Chase's seemed pinched taut and wrinkled deep by the pains of life.

"When we divorced after the sentencing, I moved here. I bought as well as I could afford. I don't think Cordelia even unpacked before she took off to greener pastures," her mother laughed hollowly. "Mr. Chase couldn't afford to leave Sunnydale, given the many businesses he owed for financial services squandered." She blew out a puff of smoke. "If Cordelia ever went to visit him, I never knew about it."

"So he lived in Sunnydale, but I-I'm sure he got out before…" Angel coughed. "Before, you know. The quake."

Her glittering brown eyes rested on him for a moment. "I have no idea."

"I'd be happy to make some inquiries, do some investigation. And it would, of course, be free of charge. It's what I –we – Cordy and me – used to do. "

Cordelia's mother looked at him absently. "I always wondered what exactly you two did together."

"Ah, Mrs. Chase –"

"I have every parent's dream, you know, an empty nest," she choked out. "I've raised my child to be completely independent of me."

"Mrs. Chase…"

"Mr. Angel," she spat back. "Do you have children?"

He hesitated, thinking that the admission would cause more questions than his need to voice it would be worth.

"No."

"Well, then, you'll have to take my word for it that when your child tells you that she'd rather spend every Thanksgiving, every Christmas, every ounce of free time with her co-workers and a supervisor who has," she eyed him distastefully. "A rare and deadly sun allergy, rather than with her own mother…" she took a shaking breath. "That it hurts like the worst kind of hell."

"I know," he said automatically. "I mean, I can understand. Cordy and I, we had a very special bond."

"And yet, this is the first time we've met," she smiled brittlely. "Doesn't that strike you as strange?"

Angel could not find his voice to respond.

"Your bond, as you call it, apparently overwrote the need for any real family in her life," her mother said flatly. "You could say that this memory loss might be a blessing in disguise. Well," she smirked and in a voice chillingly like her daughter's, sneered, "Maybe you wouldn't, but I would."

Angel's throat went dry. "How do you figure?"

"Her memory is lodged on the summer we moved here to the Los Angeles area. Cordelia caught mono that year. She had fever dreams, hallucinations. That's where her mind has chosen to retreat to. Not with you," she added bitterly. "But here, where she was safe. Maybe the last time she ever felt safe." She looked up at him with eyes full of tears. "My baby came back home to me. If you think I'm giving that up easily, you're in for a hell of a shock."

Angel looked down at his hands awkwardly. As much as he wanted – needed – to have Cordelia's steadying influence in his life again, he couldn't argue with this. He knew it too well. Nodding shortly, he got up from the table.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card. "If she ever...asks for me, for any of us, I'd consider it a huge favor if you'd please give her this. There's a private number she can call at any time." He eyed her warily. "You have every reason not to trust me. But you have to know that I only want the best for Cordy."

"Then that makes two of us." Mrs. Chase curled the card into her hand without looking at it. "I certainly won't stop her from seeing you if she wishes. It's hardly my intent to imprison her." She stubbed out the remaining cigarette butt in a crystal ashtray that, Angel thought, looked zip codes away from her current neighborhood. "All I want is another chance to make things right."

He offered a smile. "It's not often that they come along, is it?" He didn't wait for her to answer but headed for the front door.

"But the sun's almost up! What about your allergy?" Mrs. Chase called out.

But Angel shook his head and continued outside, welcoming the pain of a brief singe in the early daylight before reaching his car.


	12. Chapter 12

He awoke in an empty bed.

Reaching out, he ran his hand over the bare sheet where the covers had been thrown back. Not even lukewarm. She'd been gone for a while.

_She worked up to it quiet._

Spike shook his head and grabbed the cordless phone, stumbling out of the bed and into the living room of the silent apartment as he dialed.

"Win, love," he greeted her when she answered her cell phone on the first ring.

"Hey!" Her voice erupted in anxious enthusiasm. "I should've left you a note, I thought about it, about leaving a note, and then I just ran out and completely forgot and I sure didn't mean to worry you…"

"'Salright. Don't need a note." _I need you_. "Just need to know that you're safe."

"Yeah, sure," her voice chirped back. The hiss of the car moving rushed in the background. "Sure. I'm good. I just have to do this thing and then I'll be back. It might take a while, maybe the afternoon. I would've asked you but you were sleeping and I didn't want to wake you up…"

"It's fine, love," he replied, rubbing the tense spot between his eyebrows. "You take your time. Do whatever you need."

The line buzzed and faded from the lack of a cell signal.

"Oops, sorry about that. Spike? Honey? You still there?"

"Yeah," he said loudly. "Here. Just get what you need done." He clicked the phone off before she could cut out on him again and paced for a few quick seconds.

She needed this, after weeks of trying to work off the physical effects of sedation, the emotional effects of murder. He should be happy – thrilled even – that she could return to her daily habits so quickly, that she didn't need him anymore.

_She just kept pulling away._

Frowning, he stomped over to the kitchen counter where the other phone charger rested and slammed the phone in. His eyes wandered to the plastic box next to it and he smiled fondly at the quaintness of his girl.

"Can MacGyver me back from the dead without so much as bloody duct tape but she bought a new answering machine to take calls."

A steady red "1" shone in the message window. Curiously, he pressed the play button.

"Hey, this message is for Winifred Burkle? Yeah, I found your physics notebook over in Jordan Quad today and it had this phone number with your name in it. I guess you're off-campus? Anyway, gimme a call the next time you're on the Farm so you can get this back. I'm at West Lag, room 202. Oh, and this is Daniel."

The Farm? Quad? What notebook?

"The hell…?" he muttered and sat at one of the bistro chairs at the kitchen table. Sliding her laptop over toward him, he opened the screen, clicked on the browser, and typed a few words in. He selected the first link:

Stanford University: Stanford Speak **The Farm -** Campus nickname, derived from the days when horses rather than students roamed in what previously was the farm of university founders Leland and Jane Stanford.

"Fucking hell," he breathed. "She's gone back to university?" The force of his shock sent him backward into his chair.

But then, what had he ever done to let her know that he supported her in whatever she wanted to do? Besides follow her back like a puppy back to Wolfram & Hart, which now that he paid any attention to it at all, had to be the last place on earth she would've wanted to be. He'd wanted her to get better – of course he wanted it. Maybe too much.

So she'd done just that. Shown him what he wanted to see. She'd acquiesced; she'd capitulated and returned to what passed for her normal life with him in tow while secretly she planned something altogether else. The thought of what her life could be with her education finished stretched out before him in his mind like a vast speeding thoroughfare.

"The hell with that!"

He smacked the screen of the laptop down and screeched the chair back. He stomped to the bedroom and began to dress wildly, shoving legs into jeans. He could find Stanford easy enough; he knew her car, knew her scent and he could meet her on her own turf and let her know that she didn't have to play games anymore. That scientist, physicist, student…whatever she wanted to be, she'd always be his and he'd be by her side, cheering her on every step of the way. He grabbed keys off the bureau, then turned around and grabbed sunglasses as well. The glare on the highway would blind him for sure.

He stopped. The glare.

"You stupid git."

He could make it in the car certainly, with its special vamp-tested glass. After that? He'd have to settle for stalking her. He'd never be able to walk around outside to find her and pledge his troth, not for another eight to ten hours at least. Spike sat down on the edge of the bed.

All of her actions might have perfect reason to them: the careful avoidance of a lady who didn't want a cheering section but a partner; who wanted a fellow to take the hint. The pictures that they'd taken together at the Santa Monica Pier were framed and displayed on their walls with pride, but had Fred put them up because they showcased the two of them together? Or because they suspended that memory of his humanity, something that would never return?

And yet, and yet… last night, the two of them together, her ardor for him and not just how her body responded to the intricate ministrations he gave but _her. _The sound of love in her voice, her flesh never shrinking from his touch. He couldn't quite bring himself to believe that she'd gotten worked up to give him the heave-ho just yet.

_On the surface, everything looked tight. _

_Until one day, I saw her right next to me but I knew she was gone._

The phone rang from the kitchen.

"There she is!" he mumbled in triumph, sprinting to answer it and snatching the receiver up like a runner's baton. "That's you, isn't it, Win? Gorgeous thing, get on home here and tell me where you've been. I sussed out your secret, naughty girl, and I believe you deserve a spanking at the very least."

Silence.

"Uh, hi, it's me," Buffy said, with obvious discomfort. "Sorry to disappoint."

His guts plummeted.

"Hey," he said, recovering. "That's my line."

"So Fred's out?"

"Out and about. Why?"

"Well, I find that a little strange. That in light of looming apocalypses she decides to what, run out to stock up on bread and milk?"

Spike scowled. "She doesn't know. On account of me not telling her. Yet."

"Spike!" Buffy yelped, on the exact key that mimicked the pain in his head of the old chip firing off. "How could you not tell her? This is important, this is everything – everything that we've tried our damndest to rid the world of is crawling back out of the Hellmouth, hell-bent for another go."

"I'm not so sure about that, Slayer. Didn't try to ward you off on it last night, on account of you having a fresh mission to occupy yourself with, but I don't think it's a repeat performance from the First." He fished in his back pocket for cigarettes, lit up gratefully before remembering that Fred hated the smell of smoke inside the apartment. Inwardly, he shrugged. _Sod it. _He might need Gunn and Anne's shelter after all.

"You're the one who hinted at it," Buffy said testily.

"And you cut through the meat of it," he corrected. "That being, what do we know that scares demons off? Led you down the path, yeah, but not 'cause I got a case of déjà vu. It's something _like _the First, right? Something that wants demons to give a place a wide berth maybe, seein' how the vamps are gettin' pushed out block by block."

He could practically hear her gears shifting. "Like a sentry. Securing a perimeter."

"Spoken like the former military mistress herself."

She coughed nervously. "If we're wrong, then we're really wrong. In the huge, not-good, town-swallowing kind of way."

"So what's your bright shining beacon of thought? You already get Angel on the horn, start the charge of the Poof brigade?"

"No, Angel's gone somewhere. He didn't leave a message and neither did I. This isn't exactly the kind of thing I could leave on voice mail."

"Well, Charlie's always up for the grassroots sorts of fights. We can meet here if you've a notion, wait on Fred and make a charge come sunset."

"No."

Spike rolled his eyes and flipped off the phone he held in frustration.

"Then what, Slayer? Enough with the riddles."

When her voice came through, she spoke in a whisper. "I need to see it."

Instantly, that old instinct about her flared up like a phantom pain. He knew exactly where she meant.

He drew on the cigarette thoughtfully. "Why?"

"Because I do. Because it's been over a year and it's too easy for me to forget about if I don't go back to remind myself once in a while. How hard we fought and how we almost lost. How we did lose, so many good people."

"It's a dead place, Slayer, a cemetery without stones."

"Then I'll feel right at home."

"There's nothing _there_," he insisted, digging the cigarette butt into a bread plate littered with crumbs. The remnants of Fred's breakfast. Time for breakfast meant no time for a note.

"You've been back there then?"

"No reason to go back."

"Then maybe you should see it, too."

"Now you're trying to drag me along for your trip down memory lane?" He snorted. "You can forget it."

"And what if there's something there? Something more than a big hole in the ground?"

"There isn't."

"But you haven't even gone back! So how would you know?"

"Dammit Buffy!" Spike slammed his fist on the counter causing the plate to clatter. "What the hell do you want from me?"

"Come with me," she answered quickly. "Drive me there. Then you can rub my nose in it, how right you've been. Or we face what's there head-on, like we've done before. Either way, it's a win-win."

"More like a buggered-buggered," he mumbled. "You know I won't be able to leave the car at this hour."

"It's okay," she said gently. "I need you more inside the car than out."

"Right. Should I don the chauffeur's hat for you?"

"Spike," she whispered his name with a balm of regret. "That's not why I need you."

The tone of her voice made him wonder at her again. Here was Buffy -- the girl who held up the "One" after Chosen like a placard -- humbled and prostrate for his help in a way that even his own girlfriend seemed to have trouble managing. He'd never have imagined it. Then again, perhaps this was Buffy's way of luring him in to confessing everything he knew about the dead slayer and ending what had already become a long enough visit.

"Be there in ten," he said curtly and hung up the phone.

* * *

Fred pitched forward into the dust, the nausea twisting her guts like the ringing out of a towel. The motion forced out the bit of breakfast that she'd managed to choke down earlier: toast with peanut butter; no jam. Just the thought of it – the cloying thick richness of the Peter Pan with the nuggets of petrified peanut scraping her throat on the way back up – made her groan and heave anew although nothing came out.

She knelt in the dirt and rested her head on the car's fender, wishing it were cool. How nice cool metal, cool anything would feel against her throbbing head. Especially cool skin. Especially Spike's.

Thinking of Spike made her shudder, the tender muscles of her thighs clenched for him reflexively. The guilt for leaving him behind again blended with the sickness to her stomach and a fresh burst of sweat broke out on her brow. Her whole body had become hot, feverish, consumed in these last couple of weeks, as though some foreign and diligent laboratory busily multiplied with life under her skin and without her consent.

_The flu. This had to be the flu. And just normal flu, not the Steven King kind of sweeping pandemic that an evil establishment like Wolfram & Hart might keep incubating in its tombs of laboratory refrigeration compartments. Not a demonic incubus of infection that would wear its hosts down into exhaustion so that they couldn't fight a worse plague that might be unleashed._

_No. Just the flu._

If Spike had known, he never would've let her drive – certainly not the marathon trek up to Stanford. She'd heard the young boy's message totally by accident on the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. He'd called late, found her notebook (after barhopping perhaps) and never thought to look at a clock. His complete unawareness of adult time made her smile. She'd never _not_ had that. Even in Pylea she forced herself to commit to a schedule: forage at night, sleep in the mornings, hide during the afternoons. It gave life a sense of normalcy and reality that even a hell dimension couldn't shake. She would give anything for it now; being this sick, this unhinged from what usual people had that passed for daily living, had made her feel like she'd unknowingly crossed into another dimension. Or that everyone around her had, and inched away from her further every day. Besides being intermittently ill, Fred simply felt, well, _peculiar_. But that alone did not warrant a visit to a real medical professional.

She hadn't felt really ill until Buffy had shown up.

Buffy, she of the bouncing blonde mane and sunny California smile, who still believed that time held Spike suspended in wait for her and had simply heard some internal alarm go off in her bouncy bleached noggin that stirred her back to him. How she'd kissed him, it had been so sure, so certain – as though they were already still lovers.

"Maybe they are," Fred whispered. The more she stayed away from Spike, the more she left the possibility open that anything could happen in her absence. It would be right that Spike and Buffy would be together. It made sense amid chaos and Fred had always been a huge proponent of sense. She slumped to a sitting position by the side of the car, out of the harsh rays of the sun.

If Spike and Buffy did get back together (_ohh, God, I think I'm gonna puke again_), the practical scientist in Fred told her that there would really be nothing she could do. Who kept hydrogen bonding with oxygen for heaven's sake? Shoot, it just _happened_ and the energy used to break them apart would probably fuel cars someday…

What she could do was stand by him; let him know that she wasn't going anywhere. End this Connor experiment or at least bring Spike in on it – and not because she needed him out of weakness. They were simply stronger together.

"Take _that _polar covalent bond, Miss Buffy Summers," Fred grumbled, stood up to a head rush and carefully eased her way back to the driver's side of the car.


	13. Chapter 13

Buffy clasped the handles of her purse nervously, standing on the hotel's curb and glancing down the driveway with an anxious eye. Black, large-framed sunglasses shielded her eyes from the late morning sun and her black blouse heated uncomfortably. A few more minutes and she'd break into a sweat. But she needed to be out here, to show Spike that she'd wait for him. Buffy patted the back of her neck with a frown, feeling for the silver chopsticks that secured her upsweep. She should've worn her hair long – he'd loved it that way. Loved it so much she'd hacked it off to spite him, as though she could amputate his love with the beautician's shears. A desperate, rebellious move, it had only succeeded in a new haircut and further proof that Spike's love for her had run deeper than the length of her highlights. She had to keep reminding herself: "had run," "had loved," past tense. A past she dearly wished to revisit.

No, scratch that. She wanted Spike _now_, him with his soul, tempered and humbled after his struggle with incorporeality; him with somewhat of an amends with everything he'd seen and done. Especially with the low gleam of his sacrifice, his success, shining in his eyes. _"See?"_ his stare seemed to mock her. _"Told you I could do it."_ As much as he chastened her with his very existence, Buffy realized that she'd rather have this Spike, with his pride of accomplishment, than any previous incarnation.

"Although adding that madly-in-love-with-me accessory wouldn't hurt," she mumbled, blowing a cooling breath on her sweaty chest. She checked her watch. Almost fifteen minutes late. So much for him racing over to fetch her.

Just as she decided to turn back to the hotel and get out of the sun, Buffy was startled by the whine of a motor and crunch of tires on the driveway behind her. She looked over her shoulder and saw a lean, black sports car purring in wait. The car glimmered in the sunlight, its finish polished to a mirror shine and the glass tinted impossibly dark. She hesitated and took a curious step toward the car, bending over to squint through the passenger side window. Other than the motor, the car remained still.

Her hand reached out to touch the glass. "Spike?"

The window slid halfway down, causing her to spring back in surprise.

"Jumpy Slayer?"

Buffy caught her breath. "So it is you."

"Told you I'd be here."

"And almost on time, even," she added.

"Beggars can't be choosers, love," he said lightly. "You want, I'll turn around and go back to my regularly scheduled program."

"No, please don't go," she implored. "I'm sorry, I don't know why I said that."

"Because you're you. Now get in before the sun shifts."

While the window buzzed upward, Buffy scrambled into the car and shut the door quickly. He'd squired himself again in black, now to match his vehicle: black t-shirt, jeans, and leather jacket. Not the duster. A new, shorter and more fashionable style that she realized he'd never pick out on his own.

She smiled gratefully. "Thank you for doing this, Spike."

His expression behind his own black sunglasses remained impervious, and he grunted in return. "Driving ain't that hard. It's the trip that's the bloody nuisance." Her mouth dropped open. "Damn well take us all afternoon." Her mouth clamped shut.

"I know," she nodded. "Thanks for doing this."

"You said that."

Frowning, she aimed the car vents in the dashboard at the floor and tried not to shiver.

"You cold?"

"No, I'm good."

"You look cold."

"Well, I'm not."

"Buffy, if you're cold, bloody well fix it. Fiddle with the knobs. Don't freeze to death on my account."

"I'm fine," she snapped, then took a breath. "Really. Thanks."

"Suit yourself," he muttered with a small shake to his head and turned the car on to the highway.

After a few quiet minutes, she reached over to the console, every movement closer to him like crossing a chasm.

"I guess maybe I could cut the AC down a little. You know, to save on gas."

His mouth twisted into a grin. "Might as well settle in, put on some background noise."

"What's in the CD player?"

"Nothing for you. Radio's yours if you can stay off the talk stations."

Flipping through the satellite feed's two hundred channels wasted a few more dragging minutes, though each "beep" from the receiver seemed to clench Spike's jaw tighter.

"This bothering you?"

"I've had worse."

Latin jazz – beep—classical – beep – the blues – beep. No one had prepared her for what would be the ideal soundtrack to return to the Hellmouth with Spike. Romantic love songs – BEEP…

"Oh, for fuck's sake!" Spike erupted at last. "Just bloody pick something!"

Buffy stopped on alternative rock and sat back in her seat. Spike took off his sunglasses and stabbed them on to the top of his head, then stared at the radio as though it had insulted him.

"_That's_ what you want to listen to?"

"You said pick something."

"I meant something halfway decent."

Buffy sighed, resting her arm on the passenger door. "Put in a CD, Spike. I'll listen to anything."

"Can't."

"Why? Is the player broken?"

"No," he said evenly. "Just ain't your sort of music."

"Spike, I don't care. If you like it, then it's fine with me." Perhaps this is how they'd find their way back to each other, discovering shared tastes previously undiscovered. Over music! So simple and yet, so meaningful.

"You don't get it," he said tightly. "It ain't for you to hear, Slayer."

"What?" She turned in her seat to glare at him. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"They're not…I don't…they're only for…oh, balls. I don't play 'em for anyone else. They're for me. Me and Fred."

Buffy leaned back, deflated. "Oh."

"Know it sounds daft. But," he shrugged, hands gripping the wheel tightly. "Wouldn't be fair to Win. One thing drivin' you all over creation. Start playin' our music for you, too, well, that's off the bend."

She chanced a look at him. "Spike."

"I'm not budging on this, Slayer."

"No, no, I don't expect you to. You have this to share with Fred. I get it, really. It's what couples do," she added wistfully.

"Do tell."

Buffy had forgotten how to read his sarcasm. She could've sworn she heard a question behind his words. Even after their public displays, could he possibly be unsure of Fred's affections?

"Tell what?"

"Your take on couple behavior. We got hours in a car together. It's as good a topic as any."

With a gulp, Buffy drew from her reserves of international diplomacy that European living had foisted upon her and plunged forward.

"If you're asking do I believe that you're worthy of all the love and support that Fred can give to you, of course the answer's 'yes,' Spike. There's no reason why you should ever feel lonely or inferior with whoever you choose to be your partner."

"You copy that answer straight out of Headshrink 101?"

"It's not psychobabble," she argued. "It's what I feel and I mean it and I'm going to keep saying it until you get it through your thick skull. You're worthy, Spike, of course you are."

"That a fact?" He raised an eyebrow at her. "So all I had to do was burn up from the inside out to get that outta you."

"Spike, you know that's not what I meant."

"No, I see the meaning 20/20. I offer a general conversation on couples and you bring it back to me and you."

"Well, that's what I think about. What I'm always thinking about lately," she mumbled.

"All of two days?"

Her head whipped to face him. "Since I watched you die!"

His hands gripped the steering wheel tighter and Buffy became very still.

But instead of a reply, he brought a hand to the breast pocket of his jacket, removed a cigarette, and stabbed the car's push button lighter in.

"Italians finally get you to smoke?"

"No." She waved a hand. "But they made me more used to it. Go ahead."

Every calm action from him told her that he would've regardless.

Spike breathed smoke in and out, shifted in his seat, finally spoke. "I was curious on what you reckoned made a couple tick, seein's how I damned well never saw it come from you."

She smirked. "I'm guessing it takes more than mix tapes."

"Mix CDs," he corrected.

"Whatever!" she shouted back.

"If you weren't starin' down the barrel of Fred hangin' over me, you'd be singin' a different tune."

"Staring down the barrel of Fred hanging over you? Care to cram a couple more metaphors in that mix?"

"Sidestep the issue much?"

"I'm not…" Buffy rolled the thought on her tongue before voicing it. "Jealous, if that's what you're thinking."

"Ho no!" he chuckled. "No, not you."

"I'm really very happy you're with Fred."

"'Course you are, love."

"You deserve every happiness."

"Beyond the telling of it."

"And if Fred can provide that, then great."

"Here it comes."

Buffy bit her lip. "_If_ she does."

"I knew it!" he crowed. He pointed an accusing finger at her from the steering wheel. "You think she's too brainy for me."

Her lips parted in surprise. "Uh, no, not even close."

"I did actually read a book or two in that crypt. Poet here, remember?"

"Spike…"

"And what about," he cleared his throat. "'I died, so many years ago…' That song? The spell be buggered, I made those words up straight off!"

"Spike!" Buffy cried helplessly. "This doesn't have anything to do with you being smart! It doesn't have anything to do with Fred, either!"

"What then?"

"Me, Spike! I'm here, I'm finally here and you look right through me! I lied to you, all right? About being jealous. I am jealous," she admitted, looking at her feet. "But not because you're something I want to win away from another girl, like a prize. But for you. To just have you."

"Have me. You don't even bloody know me."

"I don't, I haven't, and I want to."

Spike glared at her in dark triumph. "There's the magic word! You want, so let's go about makin' it happen. Where'd I be without you, Buffy? You wanna know where? Back home with Winifred, where I fucking belong, that's where."

"Then why keep me here? Why draw this out when you know that your confession means that I leave? What the hell are you waiting for?"

"Not for you, Slayer. Put a right end to that."

Buffy tried to close her eyes from the burning smoke, wishing that she could likewise shut out his words.

"Means more than just a confession anymore, yeah? Means me on trial. Which means I got to take a kind of care with how I word things to you, don't I? Or I'll find myself needin' to check on my last passport stamp."

"You won't need one, the council will send a private plane," Buffy said automatically.

"There's a comfort," he snorted. "What I want to know is, who decides if my story passes muster or not?"

"Well, there's an inquiry committee…"

"There's a committee now?"

"I'm faxing them all of my notes. All two pages of them, so far. I'd add your statement and they'd let me know which witnesses they would need to come over for the hearing."

He looked over at her hopefully. "So you're saying that there's a chance I could give you my run-down, you fax it in, and we're done?"

"Yeah, sure," she sighed. "It's a definite possibility."

"All right then, pet," he smiled at her, his first real smile since they started driving. "Got paper and pen?"

"Oh. Lemme see." She picked up her purse and rummaged for a few moments. "I, uh, hmm. No."

"What do you mean 'no?'" he demanded. "Thought that was your whole diabolical plan: trap me in the car until you got your soddin' confession."

"There wasn't anything diabolical about it. I guess in light of where we were going, I sort of… let it slide." She shrugged and tried not to look at him. "Pretty lousy Watcher I'll make, huh."

"Cut yourself a sliver of slack," he rumbled, stubbing out the cigarette. "Reckon you'll make out all right in the end. If it's what you really want."

"Right," she said softly. "Thanks."

"Buffy…" He paused and she managed to drag her eyes over to him, cringing at what she knew she'd see: that apologetic, appeasing, damnably peaceful look.

"Look, about this trip. Only a handful of us who're left, yeah? Me being the only one in the city limits. Angel wouldn't give it a toss, I'd wager, else you would've asked him. The Bit would've made your best passenger."

"Are you kidding? Dawn never wants to see this place again."

"Harris then. Point is, we're gonna get there, you're gonna see there's an empty hole in the ground, and it's gonna hit you, where you really are. Don't let it blindside you, all right? Don't make more out of it than there is, love."

Spike reached out and clicked at the radio control, settling on a classic rock station with music soothing in its familiarity. Pointedly, he turned up the volume at a level not earsplitting but loud enough to bar conversation, leaving Buffy to mull what exactly she shouldn't make more out of: the Sunnydale crater or his presence by her side.


	14. Chapter 14

Fred wove through the maze of pavement paths and found her way to Jordan Quad, the meeting spot she'd arranged in the span of a brief phone call. A young man stood waiting near the entrance, all red hair, freckles and gangly teenager. Easily a freshman. His head cocked around the heads of passersby and his fingers drummed anxiously on a familiar sight – Fred's notebook. She felt a wash of relief.

"Hey!" She lifted her hand in greeting. She sped up, waving, until the boy caught her eye. She watched as he appraised her and mentally rejected her, perhaps dismissing her for a potential love interest on account of her age. His hopeful face shifted into polite disappointment.

"So you're Winifred, hey. Here you go." The boy who called himself "Daniel" held out her book. "You must be psyched to get this back. You've got some fierce equations goin' on."

"Thanks, I guess I do." She took the book from his hands and frowned. The back cover had been completely ripped off, leaving the wire spiral stretched and bent around the leather cover and remaining pages. "This is it? I mean, what happened?"

"Yeah, sorry, this is how I found it," the boy shrugged.

Fred pictured what she had glued on the inside of the back cover, saved like the smallest touchstone that she could revisit whenever she chose: an ancient, yellowed postcard of the Hyperion's exterior. She'd found it once when she still lived there and had kept it. She only glued it in her notebook after they left, at first as a gentle reminder of where they'd come from. Lately it had served more as a testament to all that they had lost.

"I knew it was more than trash," the boy continued. "I thought it was weird, you know, but whatever. Lot of random weirdness going around here these days."

She looked up at him. "What do you mean?"

"I don't know," the kid shrugged again. "Full moon stuff, I guess."

"Like?" she prompted. Working with Angel had taught her that one person's "random weirdness" could often signal another person's apocalypse.

Now Daniel was watching her continued interest with suspicion. "Uh, some break-ins, ransacking the cafeteria kitchen. Library books missing." He paused. "Attacks."

Her eyebrows shot skyward.

"Probably just fraternity pranks. But this guy I know got jumped last weekend from some wackjob hiding up in a tree. Said it was like getting mauled by a rabid Tarzan." Daniel shook his head in disgust. "Man, it's all in the Stanford Daily. You could pick it up once in a while, jeez."

His indignation spoke volumes. "Let me guess," she ventured. "You work for the Stanford Daily." When he nodded, she plowed on. "Think your friend might wanna share his story with…" She pawed through her bag until her hand lighted on a bent card. "A real live detective agency?" Fred proffered the wrinkled business card of the defunct Angel Investigations. "We'll pay him for his trouble," she hurriedly added.

Daniel squinted at the card. "You'll pay? No shit? What's the catch?"

"No catch. Let's just say we're looking to expand our business."

* * *

"Where are you going?"

"Oh, I thought we'd pull off so you could do some light shopping. Where do you _think_ I'm going?"

"This isn't the way to Sunnydale."

"There ain't no Sunnydale, remember? Look, the state had to detour all the main roads. We're not even supposed to be here. Highway crews made it so that no one has to see your old home town at all."

Buffy's lip twisted. "Isn't that thoughtful."

"Could be worse," he sighed. "They could've made it into a tourist trap and sold t-shirts. And it's far enough out that any beastie would need to trek a hell of a ways to find civilization to feast upon."

"And it's far enough out that no one will know about it until it's too late," Buffy countered.

Spike's grim smile faded. "Right."

"How close can we get?"

"Route I'm going will take you right to the edge. They've fenced it off, you know."

"No," she shook her head. "I hadn't heard that."

"Saw it on telly. They're tryin' to get it labeled a wonder of the world or some rot. Largest sinkhole known to man. Or beast, for that matter."

Buffy turned to look at him. "How do you know where you're going if you've never even been there?"

Spike frowned and pointed to the built-in display of the car. "It's called 'Garmin,' look into it. And, the back road maps into the crater are plastered all over the Web. The X-files crowd loves it."

"What, do people think that it's a secret underground government lab or something?"

"With mutant monsters and conspiracy theories run amok."

She managed to smile weakly back. "God, if they only knew. That's so three years ago."

The car rolled and bumped them along the makeshift road of sand and gravel, finally hitting pitted pavement and rolling them forward. Buffy squinted through the tinted glass. What looked like a tollbooth waited dead ahead, the gatekeeper for an endless crisscross of glittering barbed steel jutting across the horizon.

Spike skidded to a stop. "Bugger."

"So I'm guessing that the sentry guard and round-the-clock government surveillance wasn't mentioned on the website."

"Dunno when they added that," Spike sighed. "What now? Turn back?"

Buffy's laugh caught in her throat. "Are you kidding? After all this? No way!" She ran her hand along the side of the car's leather seat. "It feels like this thing's got some muscle to her. I say we plow through first, ask questions later."

Spike rested his hands on the wheel – and actually hesitated.

"You've got a sudden aversion to crashing into things that I don't know about?" she asked, eyebrows raised.

He shrugged. "I like this car."

"Angel's got, like, fifty bazillion."

"And this one's mine."

"It's a car, Spike. No big!"

"And I ruin it, where's our ride home, hmm? You thought of that? Still daylight, Slayer, which works out peachy for you as most things, but leaves me high and bloody dry." He tapped on the steering wheel with drumming thumbs. "As most things."

Buffy sat back. She felt as cursed as by the monkey's paw all over again, although instead of being doomed to relive the same sales exchange for a near-eternity, she was merely (merely!) furthering her loss of Spike with each wrong word and misdeed.

"You're right. I picked the most flammable time of day for you. I don't know what I was thinking."

"'Bout yourself," Spike muttered. "As bloody usual." He pulled the car into gear and began to putter towards the gate.

She grabbed his wrist. "What are you doing?" she hissed. "You're going too slow to do any real damage!"

He yanked his arm away. "Let's try to get through one day without a hair of violence, hmm? Now hush. Lemme handle it." His eyes flashed to hers briefly, reflecting only that maddening calm assurance. And just as quickly, he turned away, zipped the driver's side window down under the protective shade of the gate.

"Afternoon," he greeted the guard, a less-amiable Riley Finn clone, with a scar across his cheek and a grim expression.

"No admittance, sir. This is a restricted area."

"Kinda caught on to that, what with your spiffy guard post and all. Thing is, though," Spike leaned through the window and Buffy leaned over toward him to catch his words. "I know you're lettin' 'em in. The survivors, that is." He indicated the acre of fencing.

That's when Buffy's eyes adjusted and she turned her gaze to where Spike was pointing, to see the crude memorials that had been forged in her absence.

Clipped on with tape, with staples, with rusting binder clips: pictures. Of now-buried homes, of once-beloved pets, of smiling friends frozen in time. Also floating in the breeze were faded and wrinkled travel brochures from former motels, beckoning tourists to an arguably more hospitable destination than a mammoth hole in the ground ("Welcome to Sunnydale, California! Enjoy your stay!"). Strands of cheerleader pompoms, sunbleached ribbons clutching deflated balloons, torn pages ripped out of yearbooks, notes (their words long bled out from rain) also twisted around the fence's wires, all fluttering in the flat desert wind. And then there were the flowers. So many flowers that they seemed to have sprouted from the chain link itself, most dried in varying stages of decay or death but some very much alive and straining up to the burning sun.

"Those little woven daisy chains didn't grow in by themselves. Fact is, most of 'em look right fresh."

The surly guard turned surlier. "Not on my watch. Now before I call security…"

"You'll need it, by the time I'm done with you."

Buffy heard the shift, the change in his voice, and saw the stunned reaction in the guard's eyes. Spike had morphed into game face.

"This crater's the last home this girl knew." His voice slipped back to normal. "Give us a break or we'll give you several: arms, legs, skull. See how testy I'm feelin' and how long you take to let us in."

"Ten minutes," the guard growled finally and the electric gate slid open. Spike drove them through.

"Reckon ten minutes is the generous end of the deal," he told her. "They'll be runnin' my plates as we speak and one call to Angel, your jaunty little juggernaut ain't just between you and me, so make it fast, Slayer."

Buffy couldn't move.

"Hope you're not holdin' your breath on the gentleman opening your door."

With a shaking hand, she indicated the fence in front of them, a scant fifty feet or so away. "Who? Who did this?"

"Government, I told you."

"Not that," she choked. "Those." She indicated the fence's decorations.

"Oh. Well. That'd be from the survivors, Slayer. What," he chuckled low. "You think your troop made up the whole bloody town?"

"B-but there are pictures. Of people." She turned to look at Spike. "What people? Everyone was gone. Everyone but…"

"But me and a few ubernasties? Be pretty to think so, wouldn't it." He sighed at her stare, full of regret and recrimination and anger, anger, anger. "Buffy," he shook his head. "If it's a comfort, I don't think the ones who stayed suffered much. A million tons of a town's charred rubble puts your lights out quick."

"Who?" she shrieked. "Who suffered? No one was supposed to suffer! No one except –"

"Me? Yeah," he grinned faintly. "Well. Not everyone sticks around a doomed burg just to pull it down on himself and save the world, you know. People, bugger 'em, loved this town, couldn't bear to leave. Folks never thought it'd come to this or if they knew it, couldn't think of carrying on without this pit. Without their homes."

Buffy squeezed the corners of her eyes as though she could will the tears back. "How come no one told me? Not Xander, not Willow. God, not even Giles."

"Figured it made it easier on you, I'd suspect. So did it?"

"For a while," she whispered.

"Clock's tickin', Slayer."

"I know." Buffy breathed in deeply and swiped furtively at her eyes. She stepped out of the car and into blinding sunlight.


	15. Chapter 15

_Christ, don't read anything. Don't look at any of the damndable pictures, either. _

Watching Buffy hug herself as she strolled pensively along the fence's perimeter made Spike cringe under the weight of her near overbearing sentimentality. He missed Sunnydale not a fig, nor most of its former inhabitants, save for Anya. Any grieving for felled slayers or faceless residents had been shoved aside for more pressing concerns of corporeality and hell. Buffy, he understood, was experiencing a thing several degrees sharper than what he'd only touched on months ago. And he felt for her, truly, as much as he wished she'd hurry the hell up. Frowning, he reached in his pocket.

"Answer, lamb," he silently willed the cell phone as he dialed in earnest. Buffy's grief had opened up a cave of forlornness in him that only Fred's presence could fill. Voice mail would barely suffice but he needed to speak to her, if only to a recording of "please leave a message."

"I'm on an errand, sweet Win, but you'll not be far from my thoughts. You can never be, you know that, don't you? Got some things…" He rubbed his forehead thinking about earlier – the notebook, the school, and the secrets between them grown wider with his trip today – and tried to focus instead on what lay at their core. "What I truly fancy is an old-fashioned heart-to-heart with you on m' arm, is all. I miss you. And I love you, Fred."

The words had scarcely left his lips when the passenger side door inched open. Buffy slipped inside, her face pale and wan despite the heat. Her perfect bun had begun to unravel. She wouldn't even look at him, but instead faced stiffly forward.

"Let's go," she ordered.

Spike dropped the phone back into his pocket and whipped the car into reverse.

* * *

When Daniel introduced her to his attacked friend, Fred had to fight the urge to run directly back to her car. And she would've, except for the crowded student lounge and the need to not cause a scene. One look at him and she received all of the information that she needed. In both looks and build, the young man with a black eye and cut lip turned out to be a dead ringer for a college-age Charles Gunn.

Fred faked her way through a brief interview, shook hands, passed the boy his cash and departed, shaking from the inside out. Connor. It had to be, the boy in the tree who jumped on Charles' look-alike without provocation. Connor on the loose, just as he had been fresh from his hell dimension. Angry, vengeful, and completely wild.

Except…

She turned in the opposite direction and marched back over to the library where she had seen him before, up the stairs to the second floor stacks. There she found him - in different clothes, thankfully, but otherwise the same boy she had seen yesterday in all of his intent, ponderous study. Fuming, she stomped out of the library, clutching her keys and the remnants of her notebook in one tight grip.

What was she doing at Angel's behest? Stalking this poor defenseless boy at his home, at his local haunts, at his own college campus for God's sake, ready to charge him with the worst possible crimes that weren't even his doing. And where was Connor in all of this? Studying. Like any well-meaning student. This is what working with Angel did to a person, made her suspicious and jumpy and paranoid delusional.

"Screw this," she muttered under her breath as she started her engine. She'd stuck by Angel through this whole mess. That stopped now. She pulled out her phone. The message Spike had left for her made her smile – and made her even more determined.

"Honey, meet me at work when you're done, okay?" Fred told Spike's voicemail. "There's somethin' I've been meaning to do. Love you, too."

The doors to the business she had grown to love had been closed for nearly a year, but as of that moment, her tenure with Angel Investigations had officially come to an end.

* * *

Buffy could feel herself being propelled forward, like through the end missile on a rocket, spiraling down a wormhole, only she had no way to stop it. She tried to yell, tried to move, but the images flashing behind her eyes held her bound. Only thing to do would be to buckle down and pay attention, wait until the madness passed.

Slayer dreams sucked.

It was made worse by the fact that she hadn't had any to speak of, not since the last visit to the Hellmouth. In fact, the destruction of Sunnydale had resulted in a virtually nightmare-free Slayer. Dreams of showing up naked in the middle of the piazza at lunchtime and wearing the wrong kind of shoes didn't count. Those held no kind of portents of impending doom to the world, only her psyche. And so far, this latest dream? It sure was portenty.

She appeared to be in some kind of cheap theater with one lone, plush chair at the back – the one she sat in. The room had been divided vertically by stage curtains, creating narrow hallways with cheap movie screens at the end of each. At first glance, it reminded Buffy of that "all the world's a stage" mumbo jumbo with the first Slayer who tried to kill her in her dreams. (And how adept was she at having these now that she could analyze them while she had them?) Yet she did not wear the different costumes or portray different roles in this scenario. She saw many faces of those she'd come into contact with so far in LA. Each of these frames played onto their own screens, each separated and often obfuscated by those thick maroon theater curtains.

Gunn – Gunn happy in one frame with a familiar-looking blonde girl, clutching her around the waist and laughing hard. Then Buffy's chair jerked her over to the next scene; a rustle of maroon curtain fell and so did the projected image of Gunn, clutching his own waist, bleeding heavily from his gut into a pavement in the rain. Another shift and she saw Angel – sitting across from her over sushi, full of apology and hope – moving her to the next screen in time to witness an Angel who wielded a sword toward the wings and fire of an oncoming dragon. Wesley next – nursing his drinks and his books at Lorne's bar – and then in a flash being destroyed by some old devil's magic, a glowing force gutting her former Watcher from within. The last was Fred – sweet Fred smiling and laughing in her lab coat and glasses, wrenched and crammed into something decidedly not Fred. Something blue and ancient and smelling of cold, vicious power.

Then one other person appeared, not on a screen but in person like herself. Yet unlike her, he could move, this fine young man with a knowing smirk and a glowing amulet. He did not walk down the hallways but walked across them, tearing curtains down while he moved with a conviction and purpose that chilled her. As he passed, each film ground to a halt, sputtering its distress in the last frozen frames before burning, melting their images onto the screens until the whole of the room filled with an acrid smoke stinking of death and char. Buffy began to choke, her lungs began to fill…

"Buffy!" Spike yelled, grabbing her by her shoulders and heaving her forward.

With a strangled gasp, she came out of her restless sleep. "What?"

"You were dreamin'. Looked to be a helluva one at that." Spike sat back down in the driver's seat. The car was quiet and the surrounding area was dark. A parking garage.

Groggily, Buffy glanced around. "Where are we?"

"Back at the Poof Palace. Came to get my girl, got a message to meet her here."

"I fell asleep?"

"More like passed out cold. I wasn't even a mile gone when I heard your not-so-gentle snore next to me. Otherwise, I would've been checking you for a pulse." He studied her. "You all right?"

"So now you care?"

"Just spill it. What had you so wound?"

"I…" she started helplessly. "It was weird."

"Do tell."

She shook her head. "I can't really put it into words. I think…" Her next thought nearly sent her reeling. "Whoa. I really think I need to talk to Cordy."

Even Spike looked surprised. "Gotta say, didn't see that comin'." He paused, looking pensive. "One of _those_ dreams, eh?"

"You weren't in it," she assured him hurriedly.

"Good thing. Next apocalypse, I got my heart set on a bit part, not the lead, thanks." He eased himself out of his seat, shut his door and walked around to her side of the car.

Leaning into the open passenger door window, he caught her eyes so urgently that she let herself lapse into the warm thought of what it would be like to simply catch his face in her hands again. Only not with the wild attack of a greeting she had given him a few days ago, but tender. Loving. Full of delicate touches and remembered soft spots, caressing aching skin with lips and tongue and teasing bites. Letting him know that she could be gentle, too, not only fire and pain.

As if reading her thoughts, he moved back away from her hastily and rested his arm on her open passenger door window, which set up a fitting barrier between them.

"Look, Slayer. You may have fancied yourself a vision, but if you're looking for an audience, Cordelia might not be your best bet. To hear tell, she's no seer now, just a scared girl with her head stuck in the past."

Buffy smiled faintly. "Aren't we all."

He yanked her passenger door open. "So during your little detour into dreamland - "

"Oh yeah, sorry about that," she blinked. "I didn't make the best passenger, huh."

"Matter of fact, you were ideal. Been doing a lot of thinking."

"Was there smoke?" she grinned.

"Haha," he deadpanned back.

Then he paused, turned serious. He crouched down low so that they were at eye level and bounced lightly on his heels. "I figure, after hashing it out with myself for the better part of the day, that I might as well take my chances and ante up."

She eyed him. "With what?"

"What we were talking about earlier. Let's you and me, let's give it a go."

It had to be too good to be true.

_Spike? _Buffy could barely keep herself from crying out. _Oh, yes, oh, please, oh, thank you. At last!_ She nearly sobbed with the relief that washed over her. Upon hearing his heartfelt, simple words, Buffy had to reach under her arm and actually pinch herself to make sure that she wasn't still dreaming. Why, it must've been her sleeping next to him that had changed his mind so completely. He had watched her and thought of the last night they spent together in Sunnydale, their journey to the site of all their former battles and yes, even their love that she had denied for so long, had reawakened the feelings that had been simmering between them. He had tried valiantly, to be sure, to move on but given their history, he had finally given in to what she already knew: that they were meant to be. Certainly he had killed Leah in self-defense and with Buffy on his side, they would tackle whatever charges he might face and soldier through them - together.

She tried to keep herself from beaming. "You really mean it?"

"Hell yes. We can start now, right upstairs." Spike stood up and held her door open for her. "You ready?"

"Oh, Spike," she sighed, aching to jump out of her seat and into his arms. "I've been way ready!" She leaned down to retrieve her purse from where she'd shoved it under the seat.

"Say what you will about the evil incarnate Wolfram & Hart, they are lousy with paper and pens. I can jot down whatever you need quick and you can fax it to Giles before the ink's dried."

Buffy's head whipped up as she grabbed the handle of her bag. "Huh?"

"What we spoke on?" Spike stared at her. "You, me, a confession?"

And just like that, every thought, hope and dream she'd let herself entertain about him, crashed down around her with a thundering roar.

"Oh," she managed to croak. She felt her face collapse into disappointment. "That."

"I get what you said," he continued. "that I'm taking my chances, that I could be on trial but I figure, fuck it. I've been through worse. Don't know until we try, right?"

"Wow. You really wanna to get rid of me," she whispered miserably.

"Hmm?"

"Nothing." She cleared her throat. "If that's what you want to do."

"Someone's gotta," he shrugged.

Suddenly suspicious, she glanced at him and something in her slayer intuition prickled. "And you do have a way of...stepping in, when things need to get done, don't you?"

He met her eyes as though daring her to challenge him. "As long as confessing means I won't be gettin' burned up from the inside out."

"You might be jailed," she warned him.

"But you'd be done pokin' around us in L.A.?"

"Yes," she agreed sadly. "Finished."

"Buffy," his voice turned low, rumbling, and almost sinister. "What happened to Leah wasn't near the crime you're fixing it to be. Now, maybe it gives you a cause to rally. Well, rally on, Slayer, but not here. There's nothin' more to see, love."

In spite of herself, she winced. "I can't make you not do this. But if there's anything else for me to know, you have to tell me now."

"Nah," he shook his head. "Reckon I can be the Big Bad for you one last time," he smirked. "Seein's how I do it so well."

She bit her lip and pulled out her cell phone. "I'll see you upstairs then. I've got a phone call to make first."

He slammed her door shut and pointed to her phone. "Give my regards to the old Watcher. He'll turn cartwheels to have you back. All the Scoobs will."

"You know that none of them are my main concern."

"Buffy," he whispered. She looked up at him and saw the face she loved contorted into a mixed expression of exhaustion, defeat, and supplication. "Maybe they should be."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning stop playin' Nancy bloody Drew and go back to doin' what you do best."

"You don't get it," she shook her head, suddenly brimming with a piercing sadness. "There's lots of slayers now, Spike."

"Maybe so." He walked away slowly, hands in his pockets. "But there's still only one Buffy Summers," he continued, as though talking to himself. "Nobody can be her but you. And don't forget it." He opened the door to the garage's stairway and the echoing sound of its closing seemed to reverberate around her heart.

His words, damn it, lifted her as only those from Spike could. Did he mean to give her a renewed sense of hope?

A fresh smile playing on her lips, she scrolled through her cell phone and prayed for reception.


	16. Chapter 16

Angel shifted the papers on his desk. He hadn't been able to think of anything besides Cordelia all day.

Well, Cordelia, and who Buffy might be interrogating about the dead slayer.

And how Fred was feeling, that perhaps he'd been wrong sending her to shadow Connor, how maybe she wasn't up for it yet.

And Spike, what trouble he'd managed to stir up around the office without Fred in the lab to collar him.

And Gunn, how hopefully he was watching his back out there, that his broken leg wasn't slowing him up too much, say enough to get snagged by some vamp in an alley looking for an easy kill.

And Wes, that he was getting back on his feet again.

And Lorne…

Had any of them managed to forage a speck of good from Angel taking over Wolfram & Hart? Each one who flashed through his mind had suffered through some calamity or another, save for one, the whole reason for doing it all in the first place: Connor. And who even knew if the life Angel had tried to engineer for him was holding at all? Could he be sacrificing all of them for nothing?

"Hey Boss."

His head jerked up. "Harmony? You're here?"

"Well, duh. Even I can't rope another sick day out of a poisoned blood supply. HR was totally breathing down my neck and I've been able to walk again for almost a week anyway. So here I am."

Angel jumped out of his seat, suddenly thrilled to see a familiar face. "Hey, so come on in. Have a seat. Relax. Let me get _you_ something for a change. Otter? Or muskrat? Dead-blood free, I promise."

She eyed him warily. "Uh, thanks, but no thanks. I just popped in to go over your calendar before welcome-back drinks with the girls, 'kay?"

"Right, sure," Angel nodded and sat on the edge of his desk, rubbing his forehead. "What do you got?"

She held up her large, leather-bound steno pad. "Well, you have Wednesday breakfast with the Ano-Movic Clan, midnight golf outing with the Las Vegas vampire gamers union, Thursday coffee with the Vinji Clan, lunch with the Britzais, an update with Fred and her lab with tapas for dinner, and then the memorial service on Friday night."

"Memorial service?"

Harmony gaped at him. "For those lost. In the attack?"

"Leah's attack? Oh, you mean…people?"

"Hello, and vamps, too, thank you very much, Mr. I Hate My Own Kind Now. I could've been one of the ones who didn't make it, you know."

"Sorry, you're right. So what do they need from me? Flowers? A speech?"

She sighed theatrically, waving her hand in the air as she headed back out the door. "You can ask Fred when you do your tapas or whatever. She's the one who organized the whole thing."

"Fred did? When? I mean, why…?"

Harmony spun around on a pink satin heel and leveled him with her fiercest vampire stare - which still made Angel want to sort of smile in spite of himself.

"You mean what would make a total human like Fred care about the lowly, the dead, the demonized, the vamped? Hmm, maybe because she lives with my ex who is one?" Harmony shook her head. "It all started with, you know, Knox in the lab, when he got drained. I guess she felt bad and then it just took off from there." She lifted her chin in defiance. "If you can't come and be supportive and pretend to be weepy, maybe you should just forget it."

"I'll be there, Harmony, thank you. And I'll even try to weep, honest. Have a good night." He turned back to his desk and typed into his laptop to see his calendar. Harmony had already booked his time in for the memorial service. What could he possibly say? "Hi, I'm Angel, your boss and the reason why all these humans, vampires, and other assorted former employees are dead today…" Yeah, that opener sure needed work.

Listening to Harmony's heels echo down the hall, they seemed to reverberate and loop and get closer to him like some staccato death beat until he realized that another set of heels were approaching him altogether.

Glancing toward his door, Angel's heart sank further. "And Eve. What now."

Hands clasped behind her back, she strode into the room slinkily, taking a quick survey as she walked. "Hey champ, we've got a spanking new case." She dropped a folder on top of his pile. "Thought you'd like to be the first to know."

Angel frowned. "_You're_ the delivery girl. So I'm hardly the _first_ to know, am I?"

"Let's just say close enough." She folded her arms and waited. "Come on. You have to be a little curious. It's a biggie, could mean the future of this firm. Pretty much unprecedented."

"Gunn's gone," he said flatly.

"And lucky you, we have a fleet of other lawyers."

"Not like him. He was one of mine. So yeah, I guess you could say without him in my corner, my interest in our cases is a little lacking these days."

Eve rolled her eyes dramatically. "That would be a mistake."

"Then it's my mistake."

"Angel!"

He stood up to greet the figure standing in his doorway. "Fred?" He walked over to her. She looked peaked and disheveled. "Are you okay?"

"No," she shook her head. "No, I'm not, I'm really, really not."

"Come talk to me. You want some water? Something to eat? Eve can - "

"Whoa," Eve raised her hands. "I'm a legal liaison, not a waitress."

"Then leave, if you can't be useful," Angel growled. He turned back to Fred. "Let's sit and – "

"No!" Fred yanked her arm away. "I'm not going to sit. I'm sick and tired of sitting and – and this!" She waved around the office wildly. "All of this! I hate it! I hate what we're doing! I hate that you brought us here."

"A little late for that," Eve noted.

Fred reared towards her with a shaking, pointing finger. "Now you shut up!"

Angel grabbed her and pulled her back, turned her gently to face him. "What is it?"

"I'm done," she whispered. "I'm done here, with you. With everything that you've asked me to do." Her eyes gleamed at him meaningfully.

He knew what she meant. No more recon missions, no more spying on Connor.

The loss of her stung him deeply and truly shocked him to his core. Even after all that she had gone through, he hadn't expected for_ her_ to leave him.

His next words came out raw and full of emotion: "Fred, not you, too. Please. I need you."

"Oh, I know you do," she smiled sadly. "And that's too bad. 'Cause what I need isn't anywhere near this place."

"Win!" Spike exclaimed, hurrying through the door. "About bloody time! I was nearabout frantic." He eyed the two of them. "Somethin' goin' on here?"

"Oh, terrific," Angel groaned.

"No, definitely not," Fred said. "Not anything, not anymore. I told him I'm done working here."

"That so? Then hands off, mate," Spike said tightly. "The lady said she wants to go."

Angel squeezed her fingers even tighter, willing her to look at him. "Think about what we're trying to do…"

"That's all I do is think about it! There's more to life than this!" she cried. She pulled away from Angel to wrap her arms around Spike's waist. Hugging him gratefully, she met his eyes. "I know you guys go way back. If you wanna stay…"

"Hey." He snubbed the underside of her chin with his thumb. "You say we're gone, the door won't bloody catch us on the way out. I only came here for you, Fred."

"Pretty typical, Spike," Angel said bitterly. "It's your mess, let everyone else clean it up."

Spike glared at him. "How's that now?"

"You're the one that undid the mindwipe in the first place! If it weren't for you – "

"If it weren't for me, they'd all still be sufferin' from what you did to 'em. Let's not trust our people, right? Let's bury 'em under some fake memories and let their heads crack open from the strain. There's our leader."

Angel let his fists open helplessly at his sides. "I didn't know."

"You didn't want to know," Spike replied. "That's pretty typical from my end."

Fred blinked up at him. "Well, there actually is more to it."

"Don't tell him, Fred," Angel snapped.

Spike took a step forward. "Talk to my girl like that again and see how far you get."

"I thought you said you were leaving," Angel sneered.

"Not fast enough," Spike shot back.

Eve cleared her throat from her perch on Angel's desk. "I wouldn't let them go too far if I were you, Boss. Seriously. You need all the help you can get. Even from these two."

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

Just then, Buffy burst into the room, forcing Fred and Spike to jump aside so that she could lunge straight for Angel.

"How could you?" she demanded, grabbing him by the shirt collar and shoving him against the wall.

"Buffy? What the hell?"

"Exactly what I said: 'What the hell does he think he's doing?' We broke bread together. Okay, well, it was sushi, so different carbs. But still." She slammed him again and the plaster of the wall cracked underneath Angel's grunting body. "How can you live with yourself keeping something like this from me? Oh, yeah," she squeezed his neck tight. "You don't exactly live, do you?"

"Buffy," Angel croaked, her strong fingers nearly debilitating his voicebox. "What – I have no idea what you're talking about."

"What happened?" Fred asked.

"I just got off the phone with Giles." She stared hotly at Angel first and then glared over at a smirking Eve. "He informed me that we've been served."

"And not with canapés, I'm guessin'," said Spike.

"With legal papers," Buffy spat. "We're being sued."

Fred's eyes popped wide. "Sued? Who's suing you?"

"The survivors of Sunnydale." Buffy let Angel go with one final disgusted shove. "Represented by Wolfram & Hart, Attorneys at Law, Los Angeles branch."

"What?" Angel slumped in shock against the wall. Then his eyes narrowed. "Eve."

The liaison had already headed for the door. "Told you that you should've read that file." She waggled her fingers in farewell as she beat a fast retreat. "See you in court, everybody."

"What did Giles say?" Spike asked Buffy.

"Not much. Your car and the parking garage don't do wonders for cell reception, but I got a decent gist."

"Your car?" Fred looked down, biting her lip anxiously. "So you were…together?"

"She needed a ride," Spike said quietly. "If you'd been home, I could've explained…and I did try to call you…"

"I know you did," she whispered back. "It's just…"

"It was just to Sunnydale," Buffy assured her. "Totally no big. Except for the hole. That was pretty big."

"Thanks," Fred replied archly, glancing at Spike. "Spike and I can talk about it later. Alone."

"You went to Sunnydale?" Angel cut in.

"Are you really in a place to be asking me what I'm doing with my time?" Buffy countered.

Angel paced back and forth, running his fingers through his hair nervously. "Look, everybody calm down. Let me think."

"That'll take a while," Spike said under his breath.

"Spike!" Angel yelled.

"You really didn't know anything about this?" Buffy asked, all the fight draining out to leave her

confused and tired. She looked around uncertainly and then settled on what Angel was holding.

She plucked the file from his hands. "May I?"

"Be my guest. Eve handed it to me not five minutes before you showed up. I hadn't even opened it."

"And that's different from all these other files because…?" Buffy indicated the small mountain of manila folders on his desk.

"I used to keep up on all the cases," he said glumly. "Since Gunn and Wes left, not so much."

After thumbing through the thick paper for a few moments, Buffy tossed the file down on Angel's blotter. "I'm officially out of my league. Lawspeak is so far over my head, it breaks atmo."

Spike picked up the folder and flipped through. "'Pursuant to party of the first part…'"

"The party part I got. They call themselves the 'Alliance of Sunnydale Survivors.'"

Spike looked up. "A.S.S.? That about covers it." He continued to read. "…'party of the second part is negligible for damages heretofore…'" His eyes scanned the pages. "Bloody hell. They're suing the whole Watcher's Council."

"For what? Saving lives?" Buffy demanded.

"Pain, suffering, loss of property, loss of livelihood, loss of whoever stuck around. You saw the memorial, Slayer. Should've figured a lawsuit wasn't far behind."

"But the whole Council?" Fred frowned.

"Of which there are, what, ten of us maybe? Thanks to crazy Father Caleb, we haven't had a chance to bulk up our numbers," Buffy said. "There's no way we can afford to replace a whole town."

"You can with your salary, Red's, whatever property the Watchers got left. Your aptly named little association wants to be the damage." Spike threw down the file. "Disband the Council and sell off the bones. There's the pay-out."

"Not all the Sunnydale survivors feel that way, I'm sure," said Fred.

"Enough to count." Buffy hopped off the edge of Angel's desk. "In light of this new legal development, I'm supposed to report to Giles at Rome's home base stat."

"And your little investigation?" Spike asked.

Buffy met his eyes for a moment and then shrugged. "On the back burner."

"Investigation?" Fred repeated. "Here?"

"No!"

All eyes turned to Angel.

"You're not leaving. You can't. None of you can. Don't you see? This is exactly what they want to happen. I didn't have anything to do with this! They want us split up and at each other's throats. This is classic Wolfram & Hart."

"You'd know," Buffy told him.

"I'm not one of them, never have been."

Buffy shook her head wistfully. "Never thought I'd get sued for saving the world."

Fred walked over to Spike, slipped her hand in his. "Where do you fit in to all of this?"

He grinned. "One of the benefits of walkin' between the lines. I ain't been named, on accounting of not belonging to a side and all."

She kissed his cheek. "Grey's a good color on you."

Buffy cleared her throat. "So who exactly is left here at Wolfram & Hart? Besides hell's stewardess who just sauntered out?"

"My Fred here just quit their lot."

Buffy concentrated on Angel. "Gunn, Wes, and Lorne are also no longer employees. And Cordy?"

"I – I had to take her to her mom's. She doesn't remember anything that she's done in the last five years."

"There's a comfort," Spike muttered.

"So Angel's the one against us." Buffy set her jaw. "Good to know."

"The big cheese stands alone," Spike added.

"Buffy." Angel focused on her pleadingly. "You know I don't want this. I didn't make this happen."

"But you're here and it is happening."

"Stay here with me and fight this. Don't hide under the Watchers Council as an excuse to get back at me."

Buffy glared. "Don't flatter yourself." In one pivot turn, she turned her back on him and headed out of the room.

"Wow," Fred said, with grudging respect. "She does make really good exits."

"Mine're better."

Smiling, she slipped her hand into Spike's. "Show me."

"Right. Let's eat."

"Works for me," Fred agreed cheerfully.

His arm left her hand only to wrap around her shoulder, and Spike glanced back at Angel. "You head a bloody law firm. You know you'll win."

"No thanks to you." Angel stuffed his hands in his pockets and turned away from them.

He stood still for several moments, feeling the empty space surround him. He didn't need to turn around to know he was alone.

Frowning, he pulled out his cell phone and dialed. The number he wanted he knew by heart.

"Look, it's me, don't hang up. I don't know who else to talk to here. Could you come in? Tonight, tomorrow, whenever you can. Yeah, I understand. Good, see you then. And hey - thanks."


	17. Chapter 17

"I may be paying for this tomorrow morning but tonight, I don't even care," Fred said, with obvious delight.

Together, Spike and Fred recounted their day under the neon glow of a flashing cactus, courtesy of Fred's favorite Tex-Mex restaurant. The couple opted for the privacy of Styrofoam containers in the car's front seat rather than facing the trilling mariachi band inside the restaurant.

"What, unemployment?"

"More the extra sour cream crossed with the green chile habanero sauce," she replied, pausing momentarily to weigh the consequences on her newly-delicate constitution. "Oh, screw it," she decided and dug into her dinner.

"'Atta girl."

"I'm definitely not going to miss that place. Still, I don't think I've ever seen Angel look so beat. And that's saying a lot."

"He did it to himself, love. Look what he put you through. Christ," Spike shook his head. "Can't believe he had you runnin' back and forth to Stanford like a hired hand to babysit his damn kid. I can barely believe he has one, more to the point. There's a strike against a benevolent deity."

"I wanted to help, though. That's what I meant about us losing our memories, how there was more to it than Angel being selfish. I guess, I mean, maybe when you're a parent, even if you're new at it, something else takes over that's bigger than yourself. You know, to protect your baby - no matter what the cost."

Spike took one look at her and then hugged her to him. Fred realized she had a huge lump in her throat to wash down with the overly-carbonated root beer fizzing in her plastic take-out cup.

"You loved that kid," he replied, kissing the top of her head before releasing her, stroking her hair back from her face. "And it's all coming back in a rush, innit?"

She nodded quickly, brushing her hand across her eyes. "So take my word for it that the mindwipe wasn't so much for Angel as it was for Connor, to protect his new life. Angel took over Wolfram & Hart and Connor was spared. That was the deal."

"Raw as it was. Deals are made to be broken, as we both know. What sticks in my craw is the lack of bloody choice he gave you all. Me, I would've at least tried to reason with you thick-headed lot before I wiped your brains away."

"Aww, you'd be the most considerate tyrant of any evil law firm, honey," Fred told him fondly, cupping his cheek in her palm.

"Damn straight. So any sign the boy's going back to the wild?"

Fred bit her lip There was so much to explain but she suddenly didn't want to damper their cozy mood.

"There's supposedly some 'random weirdness' going on around campus," she said carefully, avoiding land mines of details. "A boy got attacked, but who knows if it involved Connor." She glanced at Spike. "You don't mind me going back to Stanford to check on him, do you?"

"As long as you're not bunking with some young hulking physicist, I'm well and truly sorted."

She elbowed him gently. "You really thought I could enroll back at school and not even tell you? Silly. You're the first person I'd tell."

Spike shrugged, a smile pulling at his lips. "What about my field trip to Sunnydale with the Slayer?"

"Pfft," Fred waved his concern away. "How scary can a girl who can't drive be?"

"Win."

She fiddled with her plastic fork. "Okay, I'm not thrilled about how she wants to spend time with you. But I get it. I kind of even… like it."

Spike raised an eyebrow. "Kinky."

"Not that way," she punched him lightly in the arm. "You big brute. No, what I mean is…you still care for her."

"Yeah," he snorted, soaking a tortilla chip into a bowl of Fred's hot sauce before crunching it between his teeth. "Care that she's still swinging her axe in my neck of the woods, that's for certain."

"No," Fred answered patiently. "You have feelings for her. Not like the ones you had," she assured him quickly, seeing him fix her with a stricken expression. "But you don't want her hurt."

Spike considered it. "Much," he allowed.

"Spike. She tore up your heart to hell and back but you still don't want anything bad to happen to her. That says something."

"That I'm an idiot?"

"No, that once someone's in your heart, she stays there. Maybe…like me."

Spike gazed down at her calm, generous smile and wondered again for the millionth time how in the world he'd been allowed to have Fred.

"There's no one like you, Win. That's the bloody beauty of it. I'm yours as long as you'll have me."

She kissed the tip of his nose. "You better get comfy then. You're in for a long haul." He leaned in to kiss her and she pulled away ever so gently, glancing shyly around the bustling parking lot. "Here?"

"You said get comfy. Plus, don't forget about the wonders of tinted glass." He stacked the take-out containers into the back seat and eased his front seat back. "Got the notion to kiss you on display of the stars and the whole of Los Angeles."

"Well, when you put it like that, okay then." She leaned into him for a peck on the lips that gradually turned more intense. "Whew," she whispered, snuggling in. "Talk about stars."

Her whole body was thrumming against his, reacting as it always did with electrifying need to Spike's every stroke and touch. Through the haze of desire, a thread of a lost thought wove up through Fred's buzzing brain as Spike's lips pressed into her throat and on the skin of her collarbone as he eased her blouse away: something Spike said to Buffy in Angel's office…an investigation? What was that all about? It couldn't matter, could it? Not more than what Spike was doing to Fred right now and how he could make her feel so much, so good, and so completely loved. Nothing else mattered except the two of them, here and now and dared she dream - forever.

"Will, you're the best people-finder in life ever, even a continent away," Buffy told her friend via cell phone as she hurried toward a cab idling down the street from Wolfram & Hart.

"Mrs. Chase was a pretty easy find. She's a private citizen with normal, searchable records. And she works at Nordstrom's."

"At least Cordy will be diggin' that employee discount."

"_Why_ are you visiting Cordelia again?"

Buffy rattled off an address to the waiting driver and sat back in the seat, closing the door behind her. "She pretty much tweaked when she came out of her coma and saw me. I want to make sure she's okay."

"I can't believe I'm saying this, but poor Cordy, you know."

Buffy snorted. "Sometimes I feel like I could do with some memory loss. Were the last five years really such a hoot?"

"To have no choice in knowing isn't fair, not even for Cordelia. Hey Buffy, I know this is a stretch but if there's some way you could convince her to come over here, the coven and I could help her get her memories back."

"With spells?" Buffy wrinkled her nose.

Willow gave a snort of, perhaps, exasperation. "Not spells. Healing rituals. Guided imagery. We could even get her back to rocking visions again if she wanted."

Buffy thought about her dream, her own vision and about sharing it with Willow. Mentally, she shook her head. "I'll give it a shot, Will, thanks. I totally owe you one."

"So can I cash that in for a free lawyer?"

Buffy winced. "You heard, huh?"

"Heard? I read. It was even cool for a little while, seeing my name in the big important print, until I realized what it meant. Buffy, are we going to jail?"

"There is no jail for something like this," Buffy said. "Anyway, it's not really us they want. They want to end the Council, in the 'for good' sense."

"Oh, is that all?" Willow laughed nervously. "Gee, and here I went and worried."

"Well, stop now. This is far from the worst thing we've faced."

"One good thing about hellmouths, they sure put everything in perspective, huh?"

"About that," Buffy hesitated. "I went there today."

"To Sunnydale? I mean, old Sunnydale?"

"Old Sunnydale, now New-Big-Gaping-Hole, California."

"Why? I mean, there's nothing going on there." It came as a statement, not a question, making Buffy realize that Willow had been monitoring the activity from Sunnydale all along in her own Wiccan way.

"I thought that there might be, and you're right, there isn't. But there is something else." She heaved a breath. "I've got a serious case of the déjàs here when I say: you really should have told me. People died there, Will. I – we- weren't the last ones out. But I guess you already know that, too."

Willow went silent for so long, Buffy thought she had lost their connection.

When her friend spoke again, her voice was calm and reluctantly honest. "We didn't tell you about Spike or about the people left in Sunnydale and those are, okay, big our bads. But…" Willow sighed. "We really didn't think that those things would matter to you."

Buffy's hand holding the phone shook.

"You never even mentioned Spike after we left the States," Willow reminded her friend.

"Hello? It's called mourning!"

"Okay and after that? You never wanted to even hear the word 'Sunnydale,' never mind asking any questions about any of the people left behind."

"I…" Buffy faltered. "I just thought that, when I saw all the houses being boarded up and the car lines out of town, no one would even want to stay."

"_You_ didn't want to stay," Willow corrected.

"And then I got on a plane as soon as I found out Spike was alive! And possibly evil again, thanks to one mysteriously dead slayer that no one's mourning or talking about."

"Buffy, I was there, remember? I saw Spike. You think I wouldn't sound the alarm if he'd gone all toothy? The only possibly evil thing about him is how much he hates Starbucks."

"But Andrew said - "

"Sheesh, you're taking relationship advice from Andrew now? All he heard was that a slayer was dead and Spike was alive and did some very fuzzy math. And you ran with it. Boy, did you run. All the way to California again."

"Good thing I did, too, since none of you could be bothered to report how a slayer's dead here. Who's fighting for her?"

"Buffy, that's one slayer. And a dead one, so – convenient - you don't have to really even deal with her. You've been busier boogying with the Immortal and, and letting Faith and Giles train the living slayers and at the same time, still trying to be this super-Watcher-wannabe without doing anything other than phoning it in."

"I was moving on," Buffy said tightly. "I was living my life, finally."

"Buffy, you've been the Slayer since before I knew you. So is that the life you're living? Where you left off when you were 15? Because you're not a teenager anymore. Dawn is, and not for much longer. She needs to know that after you've saved the world? You keep saving it, that it's work that's never done."

Buffy's throat tightened.

"You say don't worry about the lawsuit and sure, it doesn't feel like a real big bad with the fangs and the 'grr-argh.' But even without the Council, _you're_ safe, you're already trained! You and Faith can go rogue or whatever. But there are brand new slayers being born every day. Without the Council, who's going to protect _them_? Buffy, I think we need to worry about this lawsuit. I think we need to worry like whoa."

"I-I've got a bad reception, Will," she answered softly. "I'll talk to you later." Buffy hung up the phone quickly and stared out the cab's window into the sunset.


End file.
